The German case against air conditioning

Heatwaves are becoming more frequent, yet politicians and environmentalists remain deeply sceptical of the technology most people reach for first.

Dear Reader,

Last autumn I moved to a part of the country that I’ve heard locals variously describe as “Germany’s California” and “Germany’s Tuscany.” Home to rolling Riesling vineyards – the largest in the world, I’m told – the Palatinate is one of Germany’s most beautiful regions.

Its location in the Rhine Valley, far from the coast, also makes it one of Germany’s hottest regions.

As temperatures soared to 40°C last week, I was glad to live on the ground floor of an early 20th-century house with thick sandstone walls. Our apartment is a man-made cave. In May, we often left in thick jumpers only to realise it was spring outside. Now we have the payoff. It offers precious relief from the baking heat outside.

Not everyone has been so lucky, though.

Our top-floor neighbours resorted to ad hoc measures to keep the heat at bay. They shuttered their living room window with a piece of plywood, with a hole cut for the exhaust hose of a mobile air conditioner. For two weeks, they took refuge in a single room in their apartment.

They weren’t the only ones. By late June, specialist stores were informing customers that they had completely run out of mobile air conditioners.

The story illustrates a European problem. Much of our housing stock was built before 40°C heatwaves became a reality.

Yet poorly insulated Altbau is only part of the problem. New buildings are also rarely designed to deal with extreme heat. My sons’ kindergarten, with more than a hundred children, has no air conditioning. After they retreated into a single darkened room, we decided to keep them at home last week.

The same gaps exist from newly built homes to hospitals, nursing homes and schools. Only around one in twenty new homes are fitted with air cooling systems, while one in seven kindergartens and nursing homes have similar technologies. Office workers are the only people consistently offered relief — a third of new office buildings have air conditioning, figures from the Federal Statistics Office show. The reason? Workplace health and safety rules require heat protection, while equivalent rules elsewhere do not.

Yet who is more vulnerable: a nonagenarian or an office worker? Heatwaves now kill roughly twice as many people as road accidents and almost all those deaths are of people on the far side of 75.

On the face of it, it is strange that Germany has been so slow to adopt a technology that addresses one of the clearest effects of climate change. Few countries have invested so heavily in climate technologies. Wind turbines and solar panels have already transformed pristine landscapes and picturesque cityscapes — it certainly isn’t a concern for aesthetics that is preventing Germany from screwing air con units to the outer walls of its buildings.

And it can’t be money either. Other climate technologies have received hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies. From the €500 billion infrastructure fund that Friedrich Merz pushed through the Bundestag last year, €100 billion was earmarked for the climate. Yet no government has seriously supported the rollout of air cooling technologies.

Photo by Muhammed Faizan Hussain on Unsplash

Partly, this reflects a reality that is often forgotten in the heat of Sommerhitze debates. Despite increasingly severe heatwaves, Germany’s winter is still far more life-threatening than its summer. Heating remains essential; cooling, for most, a luxury. Politicians don’t like to talk in terms of trade-offs. But introducing sweeping air conditioning mandates would further increase construction costs at a time when rising prices have already contributed to a collapse in housebuilding.

And yet there is another reason that appears to be preventing funding for air conditioning in places like care homes where it really is necessary.

During every heatwave, the national media asks: “Have we now reached the point where we need air conditioning?” They almost invariably find experts who insist there are better solutions.

“Forget air conditioners! Shade is a much more powerful alternative,” declared Stern magazine this week, pointing to the example of Phoenix, Arizona, where tree planting has been used to cool neighbourhoods. Others advocate more inner-city lakes, “fresh-air corridors”, or walls covered with climbing plants.

The more sceptically minded might ask whether a solution designed for American urban sprawl is going to help a fifth-storey flat in Frankfurt, or whether a government can simply plonk a lake in the middle of downtown Berlin.

It is hard to escape the impression that Germany’s political and media class find something objectionable about air conditioners that they rarely say out loud.

A recent opinion article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung offered one answer. If everyone could cool their homes with energy-hungry air conditioners, the article argued, we might begin to live under the illusion that climate change doesn’t need to be solved. “Summer downpours or heatwaves? In an air-conditioned future we could simply cool away the vague sense that this might all end very badly.”

In other words: Germans need to suffer if they are to accept real solutions to climate change. I’m not convinced this is a sound political strategy. It sounds like the sort of argument you can make if you own your own leafy garden rather than one you make if you are cooped up in an inner-city apartment.

It echoes arguments for national CO₂ levies on kerosene or steel smelting. Morally satisfying perhaps, but easier to defend from a newsroom than from an industrial town watching its biggest employer relocate overseas.

Nonetheless, support has come from an unexpected quarter this week. The Green party, previously sceptical about anything that adapts to rather than fights climate change, has now taken the initiative in calling for a national air conditioning strategy.

“The week’s record heat must be a wake-up call for Friedrich Merz,” Katharina Dröge, leader of the Green parliamentary group in the Bundestag, told Bild. “Germany needs an emergency cooling programme to install air conditioning in hospitals, nursing homes, daycare centres and schools.”

Dröge proposed taking money out of the €500 billion infrastructure fund for such a programme and tying air con installation to rooftop solar panels. The logic: heatwaves happen when the sun is shining, so running an air con unit with solar panels should be cheap and low-carbon.

That solar panels can largely offset the emissions from air conditioning is an argument long made by right-wing commentators. The fact that the Greens are now embracing it takes the idea out of one ideological corner and gives it broader cross-party respectability.

In reality, the promise that solar panels can power clean air cooling isn’t quite as neat as it sounds. Electricity prices have shot up at night over recent weeks because people want to use their air con systems when they are trying to sleep through tropical nights. And because heatwaves also coincide with high pressure — and thus near-zero wind energy production — that night-time power is coming from gas-fired power stations.

All the more reason, then, for the government to start thinking about what happens next. Because one thing is for sure, people aren’t going to wait for trees to grow up above their roofs before finding their own solutions to the problem.