From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

In Camden, North London, a homeowner did something that would strike most of the people in the world as entirely unremarkable: he fitted two air conditioning units to the rear of his flat so that his family might sleep more comfortably through a spell of hot weather. Camden Council’s planning enforcement officers thought otherwise. They ordered the units “permanently removed”, ruling that the installation breached the borough’s “cooling hierarchy” policy, and advised the resident to rely instead on open windows and balcony doors. This was no isolated bureaucratic misfire. It happened during a stretch of hot, dry weather of the sort Britain has seen periodically for decades, one that produced some locally exceptional readings elsewhere on the Continent but nothing that anyone who sweated through the summers of 1976 or 2003 would call unprecedented.

What was unusual was the accompanying alleged body count. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Met Office announced more than 2,700 estimated deaths across England and Wales attributable to the May and June heat, a figure duly repeated across the press as established fact.

As my colleague Ben Pile points out, it was nothing of the sort. The 2,700 figure was not a count of bodies but the output of a statistical model estimating how many deaths would statistically not have occurred at lower temperatures – a hypothesis presented to the public as an observed fact. Britain’s own official mortality statistics show that cold weather kills roughly four times as many people every year as heat does, a detail rarely mentioned by the same commentators demanding ever more urgent climate action. None of this should surprise readers familiar with the modelling habits of Britain’s climate establishment: last year’s equally confident predictions of a heatwave death spike were followed by mortality data that, if anything, declined through the following weeks.

The narrower point worth making is about consumer choice. The same institutions that tout estimated heat deaths to justify accelerating Net Zero are also among the loudest defenders of the planning regime that blocks the one technology already proven, unambiguously, to reduce heat mortality wherever it has been allowed to spread: the ordinary air conditioner. One might expect a policy establishment that spends every summer touting heat-mortality estimates to embrace, without hesitation, that remedy. Instead, Britain and the European Union have spent the better part of two decades constructing precisely the opposite – a regulatory architecture engineered to make it as difficult as possible for ordinary households to own, install and run an air conditioner. This is the energy-efficiency mindset carried to its logical, and thoroughly illogical, conclusion.

The cooling hierarchy

London’s planning rules, inherited from the 2021 London Plan under Mayor Sadiq Khan, instruct developers to minimise reliance on “energy-intensive” cooling wherever possible, and boroughs including Camden and Islington have adopted the doctrine into their own local frameworks. Nationally, England’s building regulations require new-build developers to prove that shading, insulation and ventilation have been exhausted before mechanical cooling is even considered. None of these regulations amount to an outright ban – existing homeowners face no legal bar to fitting a window unit – but the cumulative effect has left Britain with barely three in every 100 homes air-conditioned, against roughly nine in 10 in the United States. Claire Coutinho, the former UK Energy Secretary, called the Camden enforcement action absurd and accused planners of trapping Britain in a self-imposed climate of deprivation – a fair complaint, though one wonders how far her own party’s Net Zero commitments differ from it in kind rather than degree.

Brussels’ thermostat

The European Union’s approach is more diffuse but no less consequential. There is no single Brussels air-conditioning law; instead Ecodesign and energy-labelling rules govern which units may be sold, the revised F-Gas Regulation squeezes the refrigerants that make cooling affordable, and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive places air-conditioning into a wider inspection and certification regime. Member states have then layered their own restrictions on top.

During the 2022 energy crisis following the start of the Ukraine war, Spain and Italy imposed legal minimum thermostat settings on public and commercial buildings, and this summer, as the current heat dome settled in, the European Commission issued guidance urging households not to set their units below 25°C, noting that every degree colder adds roughly 7% to electricity consumption – advice from Brussels on how cool a citizen may make his own living room.

Nowhere is the paternalism more explicit than in Switzerland, admittedly outside the EU but instructive all the same. In Geneva, a homeowner seeking a permit for a fixed air-conditioning unit must demonstrate a genuine need for it, and comfort does not qualify; some residents have resorted to producing a doctor’s certificate. Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft go further still, barring residential units outright, while Zurich has in the past refused permission for a care home to run an ageing unit through a heatwave because it fell short of efficiency thresholds. The predictable result, as reporting from the canton shows, is a surge in sales of cheap, inefficient portable units that guzzle more electricity than the fixed systems residents were denied.

The energy-efficiency gap, revisited

The mandatory fuel-economy and appliance standards beloved of the Obama and Biden administrations rest on the presumption of a widespread “energy-efficiency gap”. Careful ex-post studies have repeatedly found that the magnitude of supposedly unexploited, profitable efficiency investments is far smaller than engineering studies claim, and that ordinary households and firms generally know their own circumstances better than a regulator armed with a spreadsheet.

A Mexican Government programme which subsidised the replacement of old refrigerators and air-conditioners on the promise of a 30% energy saving delivered only 7% once the engineers’ ex ante models met actual ex post consumer behaviour. What Europe’s air-conditioning saga adds to this record is a darker variant: rather than merely mandating that appliances be efficient, governments have moved to discourage ownership of the appliance itself, redefining comfort as a vice to be rationed through planning law, cantonal permits and moral suasion.

A recent report from the Consumer Choice Center catalogues the result as a genuine patchwork across all 27 EU states, the UK and Switzerland. Building façade rules, heritage permits, condominium consent thresholds and energy inspections vary so wildly that a consumer moving from Warsaw to Zagreb encounters an entirely different legal universe. The predictable consequence is not less energy use but more disorder: illegal installations have proliferated in the Netherlands because the legitimate route is so onerous, while in Portofino, Italy’s wealthiest town, police mounted a crackdown on illicit units after the mayor spotted one hanging over an alleyway.

None of this looks like careful regulation. It looks like prohibition, with prohibition’s familiar side effects. Red tape, aesthetic objections in conservation areas and the overriding imperative of “climate neutrality” by 2050 have kept effective cooling out of reach for millions. Increasing AC use, we are told, would undermine emissions targets. Better that people suffer than the planet be “harmed” by the very technology that has made hot summers tolerable in America, Japan and much of Asia for decades.

This is the logic of energy efficiency taken to its absurd conclusion.

There is, too, a cultural dimension which no cost-benefit analysis captures. British breakfast television has run segments debating whether using air conditioning is “selfish”. German commentators have coined the term “AC-phobia” to describe a guilt complex around climate that keeps citizens from buying a unit their American or Japanese counterparts would consider unremarkable. In responding to some US journalists and social media influencers criticising and making fun of a sweltering Paris because the city “does not have A/C in every room”, Paris Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar recently issued a statement claiming that the US bears a “significant amount of responsibility” for the ongoing heatwave in Europe.

Washington’s different answer

While London’s boroughs draw up “cooling hierarchies” and Geneva’s cantonal officials weigh medical certificates, Washington has taken the opposite path – under an Energy Secretary who has made consumer choice the organising principle of his department. On July 2nd 2026, Secretary Chris Wright announced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking intended to permanently end federal efficiency mandates governing air conditioners, gas stoves, washing and drying machines, water heaters and refrigerators, rather than merely delaying them as earlier deregulatory notices had done.

Mr Wright put it plainly: “In America, you should be able to choose a dryer that dries clothes on the first try rather than one that takes multiple cycles – unfortunately, past administrations thought otherwise.” For too long, he continued, Americans had paid the price for rules that restricted choice and drove up costs. President Trump had promised to end this nonsense, as one X user posted last year: “[i]t only took 29 years, but Jerry Seinfeld’s complaint about government-mandated, low-flow showerheads was finally taken seriously. Trump signed an EO to make showerheads great again.” Showerheads with greater pressure, washing machines and dishwashers that actually do the job, light bulbs that don’t cost an arm and a leg and plastic straws that don’t fall apart mid-drink make people’s lives easier – and it is common sense, as Secretary Wright would put it.

This move sits squarely within the broader deregulatory framework established by President Trump’s Executive Order 14,192 of January 31st 2025, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation.” That order imposed a “10-for-1” requirement: for every new regulation issued, agencies must identify at least 10 existing ones for repeal, with the explicit goal of driving net regulatory costs significantly below zero in the first year. It is a sharper version of the 2-for-1 rule from Trump’s first term.

Chris Wright’s proposal rewrites the Process Rule that has, under successive administrations, required each new generation of household appliance to be more efficient than the last, and would make it far harder for a future administration to reimpose that ratchet. Wright put the matter in terms any consumer could follow, arguing that Americans deserve the freedom to choose a dryer that works properly on the first cycle rather than one engineered chiefly to satisfy a federal emissions target. Indeed, as Gary Abernathy of CFACT complained, it is high time that the US Government “stop treating us like children, coercing us into buying overpriced ‘energy-efficient’ appliances that don’t do the job!”

Consumer and climate change advocates object that the old mandates saved households on their utility bills each year while reducing emissions. Yet one academic study found that much of the policy analysis on energy efficiency “runs counter to the most rudimentary economic theory and our general sense that we do not live in a world in which people never make sound choices”. If energy efficiency were such a great strategy, would ordinary people need experts in the IEA, the World Bank or McKinsey to tell them how to save money? Is the pavement filled with $20 bills that remain uncollected, “low hanging fruit as it were”? One would think it natural that businessmen and heads of households know how to save money and cut costs as they see fit.

Two enlightenments

The contrast is not merely regulatory; it reflects two distinct inheritances from the Enlightenment itself. America’s founding generation drew on Locke’s conviction that legitimate government exists to secure a citizen’s natural rights to life, liberty and property – a principle Jefferson refashioned in the Declaration of Independence’s promise of an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. On that reading, state power is a trust granted by consenting individuals for narrow, limited purposes; it is not a warrant for philosopher-kings (or queens), however well-credentialed, to decide how warm a citizen’s living room ought to be.

Continental and British statecraft drew instead on a more paternalistic strand of Enlightenment rationalism characteristic of ‘democratic socialism’ and Fabianism. The post-war EU and UK political elites believed that an educated administrative class could calculate the public good more reliably than the public itself and was entitled to act on that philanthropic calculation. It is this second tradition that produced London’s cooling hierarchies, Brussels’ thermostat guidance and Geneva’s medical certificates: each an expression of the conviction that comfort is too important to be left to the person who has to live with the decision.

Secretary Wright’s Energy Department is reasoning in the older American idiom – that the pursuit of happiness includes the freedom to choose one’s own dryer and one’s own air conditioner, and that the state’s job is to get out of the way of that choice rather than to supervise it.

Europe does not lack the technology, the electricity supply or the wealth to cool its homes. What it lacks is a governing philosophy willing to concede that comfort, like any other good, is for the person paying for it to decide in a free market. A genuinely liberal response would streamline permitting, treat a condenser unit on a balcony as no more of a planning offence than a satellite dish and abandon the pretence that a household which chooses air conditioning over a hand-held fan has failed some test of environmental virtue. In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher king – the ‘expert’ – ruled, and the plebs obeyed. In our liberal democracies, one would have thought, ordinary people run their businesses or their household budgets as they see fit, and energy efficiency is their own business.

There, in the end, is the contrast that matters. London’s borough councils, Brussels’ directorates and Switzerland’s cantons still see no place in their air-conditioning rules for consumer sovereignty; the citizen remains someone to be managed, permitted and, where necessary, ordered to remove what he has already installed.

Consistent with Trump’s counter-revolution in US energy policy, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been moving in the opposite direction to his European and British counterparts – dismantling the mandates of his predecessors precisely in order to hand the decision back to the household that pays the bill. One tradition traces its authority to a Lockean compact that treats the citizen’s pursuit of happiness as the point of government; the other traces its authority to an expert class that decides on behalf of its hapless citizens.

A version of this article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/07/20/cool-comfort-denied-europes-war-on-air-conditioning/