The Right to Cooling

The Right to Cooling The Right to Cooling Few public health interventions have been as effective at protecting people from extreme heat as air conditioning. Yet the growing need for it is evidence of how badly the world has failed to decarbonize. On a hot evening in August two years ago, twenty-one South Los Angeles renters gathered in the offices of a local nonprofit to talk about extreme heat. “Right here I am happy and cool,” said Natalia Cordero (a pseudonym, as are the other renters’ names), gesturing toward the air-conditioned room. “But as I go to my home, it is another story.” Natalia had asthma. On hot days, the heat made it hard to breathe. Without air conditioning, she covered her windows with aluminum foil to block the sun and relied on a single fan. She got headaches, felt dizzy and exhausted, struggled to sleep, avoided cooking, and moved slowly to keep from overheating. When I asked if she’d ever visited a cooling center to escape the heat, she told me she had never heard of one. Natalia’s story was not unique. Nearly everyone in the room that night described unbearable homes during the summer. Mornings were about rushing to cook the day’s meals before heat settled in by the early afternoon. “Even going to sleep is a nightmare,” one woman added. To cope, tenants slept with wet towels, soaked their clothes in buckets of cold water before wearing them, bought bags upon bags of ice, took multiple cold showers throughout the day, lined the windows with aluminum foil, or left to the beach, the gym, fast food joints, or shopping centers. The cost of such activities adds up to, in some cases, $100 a day. Most people in the room made under $15,000 per year. The neighborhood most of these tenants call home is among the hottest and most climate-burdened in the city. South Los Angeles is a classic urban heat island—a landscape of asphalt and concrete with little tree canopy to provide relief. In some areas, just 5 to 7 percent is covered by trees, compared with a citywide average of roughly 21 percent. The community also contends with some of the worst air pollution in Southern California. Nearly one in four residents lives below the poverty line, and rates of asthma, stroke, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses are disproportionately high, leaving many residents especially vulnerable to extreme temperatures. During heat waves, South Los Angeles consistently experiences some of the highest rates of heat-related emergency room visits in the county. Extreme heat kills. It often claims more lives in the United States per year than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or any other natural disaster. When your body’s core temperature rises above 104 degrees Fahrenheit, heat stroke can occur and organs are damaged, leading to failure and death if not treated quickly. Few public health interventions have been as effective at protecting people from extreme heat as air conditioning. While passive forms of cooling such as reflective roofs can lower indoor temperatures by up to nine degrees, and a recent study showed that tree canopy can decrease bedroom temperatures by about 1.1 degrees on days above ninety degrees, air conditioning—whether a traditional unit or an energy-efficient heat pump—can reduce indoor temperatures by thirty-two degrees compared with the outdoor air. Natalia, however, like many renters, had a landlord who would not allow an A/C. “We have a ceiling fan,” said Carmen Fuentes, “but that one is not useful. Because in the afternoon, instead of blowing cold air, it blows hot air.” Fuentes, without knowing it, had described the convection-oven effect, in which fans cease to provide effective cooling once temperatures rise above ninety degrees and can instead make conditions more dangerous. When we think about extreme heat, we often picture people outside in the sun. But the reality is that for many people, the greatest danger is actually indoors. Nearly half of all heat-related deaths over the past two decades occurred inside the home. This was seen tragically during the 1995 Chicago heat wave, when many of the 739 people who died were older adults who lacked access to air conditioning. Researchers have found that simply having a working air conditioner reduced the risk of death by about 80 percent. Another study showed that as residential air conditioning became widespread across the United States, heat-related mortality on hot days fell by approximately 75 percent. The dangerous conditions inside these Los Angeles apartments led tenants to organize for a right to cooling, which the LA County Board of Supervisors adopted last August. The ordinance, which only applies to unincorporated areas of LA County, established an eighty-two-degree indoor temperature threshold. This means that landlords will have to equip their properties to be able to maintain temperatures at or below eighty-two degrees, and tenants have the right to install their own portable cooling devices. The temperature standard is set to take effect in January 2027, making LA County one of fewer than a dozen places in the United States with such a policy. Now the same tenants are fighting for the same right across the city—which has a much larger population, home to around 2.5 million renters. Over 5,000 miles away, in France, elected leaders have argued against such a measure. Despite a recent heat wave in Europe that has killed 25,000 people across the continent, Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire has called individual air conditioning “a scourge.” Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar went further, suggesting that America’s near-universal embrace of air conditioning helped fuel the warming that now engulfs Europe. “As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, you bear a significant responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing,” she wrote online, where American conservatives have started a transatlantic social media brawl by telling Europeans to just install air conditioning, the American way. Unlike in the United States, where roughly 90 percent of households have air conditioning, only about 24 percent of French households do, a pattern that holds across much of Europe. There are architectural and historical reasons for the difference, but there is also a cultural one. The French have long been more aware of the environmental consequences of air conditioning. And while the electricity argument is somewhat different in France, where nuclear power has made the grid among the cleanest in the world, the broader aversion remains. A/C is not only uncommon in homes, but also in older buses and subway cars, shops, and other public spaces. Paris has spent decades trying to mitigate climate change. Beginning in the early 2000s, and more formally with its first Climate Action Plan in 2007, the city set out to reduce energy consumption and fossil-fuel use by expanding public transit and green space, and decarbonizing—going far beyond the climate action taken by any major American city. To many Parisians, air conditioning has come to symbolize the failure of an American model of consumption built around cheap electricity and sprawl, and is antagonistic to any sense of responsibility for stewarding a planet on which human life can thrive for future generations. But Europe is getting hotter. Since the 1980s, the continent has warmed more than twice as fast as the global average. The heat waves this summer reached highs of 111 degrees, and pushed nearly half of the continent’s largest cities to break or approach their all-time heat-stress records. Cyclists in one stage of this year’s Tour de France, a race held every summer since 1903, rode 113 miles from Carcassonne to Foix in 104-degree heat on July 7. Racers now regularly wear ice vests before and after stages to keep cool. And while Paris’s response to the heat wave in June was to double down on urging “flexibility” and “makeshift solutions”—such as opening up a swimming area in the Canal Saint-Martin ahead of schedule and keeping parks open around the clock—French people flocked to Lidl stores and queued outside for as many as seven hours to get their hands on an A/C unit. Air conditioning has become one of climate change’s cruelest ironies. It is the most effective public-health intervention for extreme heat, yet the growing need for it is evidence of how badly the world has failed to decarbonize. On the origins of that failure, Paris officials have a point. The United States bears an enormous share of historical responsibility for the emissions warming the planet, while France, though not perfect, has built a largely decarbonized electrical grid and spent decades cultivating a less energy-intensive and more environmentally friendly way of life. Yet because climate change is borderless, France is not rewarded for its efforts. It can do nearly everything right and still get hotter, and it will. The number of heat waves in France is expected to increase fivefold by 2050. There is a serious environmental case against widespread air conditioning. Air conditioners do not make heat disappear; they pull heat from inside buildings and exhaust it onto already overheated streets. At scale, this additional heat can intensify the urban heat-island effect by one to three degrees. The units also consume enormous amounts of electricity, precisely when power grids are under the greatest strain, and many rely on refrigerants that, when leaked, are extraordinarily potent greenhouse gases. A world responding to a warming climate by installing billions of conventional air conditioners powered by fossil fuels is far from ideal. It is worth being explicit about how we arrived at a world in which millions of people increasingly need it to survive. For decades, oil and gas companies extracted and sold the fuels that drive climate change while developing an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what continued combustion would do to the climate. Rather than hasten a transition away from those fuels, major producers funded efforts to undermine climate science and lobbied against emissions regulations and policies that would have accelerated renewable energy and reduced fossil fuel dependence. Governments, meanwhile, continued to subsidize production, permit new extraction, and build energy systems around the continued availability of cheap oil and gas. None of this is to say that the French critique of American consumption is entirely wrong, but focusing on consumer choices alone obscures the upstream decisions that pushed and marketed energy-intensive ways of life. But there are solutions. An air conditioner powered by a fossil-fuel grid is a very different climate proposition from an efficient heat pump powered by clean electricity. Achieving cleaner cooling is possible through decarbonized grids, electrified buildings, more efficient equipment, and weatherized homes. Tree canopy, cool roofs and pavements, better insulation, and heat-resistant building materials can further bring down indoor temperatures. The question is: How do we get there? Natalia cannot decarbonize California’s electrical grid. Daniela cannot replace the gas appliances in her building. Carmen cannot plant trees on a property she does not own. Maribel cannot decide whether her landlord installs a heat pump, weatherizes her apartment, or puts solar panels on the roof. These are decisions made by utilities, governments, manufacturers, and property owners, but they are decisions enabled, constrained, and often actively shaped by powerful corporations with the capacity to determine which choices are available to consumers in the first place. The structural conditions that determine whether cooling can be both clean and universally accessible remain largely outside an individual’s control. Yet the consequences of the failure to reach that goal are borne by you and me, by Natalia and her neighbors, and by communities already most vulnerable to dying from extreme heat. In Los Angeles, any serious effort to cut emissions and address climate change must transform buildings, which are the city’s largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions, accounting for around 43 percent. Statewide, they account for 25 percent, much of it from the gas burned by stoves, ovens, furnaces, and water heaters. Decarbonizing buildings requires both cleaning the electrical grid and replacing fossil-fuel appliances with electric alternatives. This vision is shared by climate, energy, and environmental justice advocates, who have pushed for such changes for years. But the transition has been undermined by gas companies and a sprawling, decentralized network of landlords, many of whom have little financial incentive to make expensive upgrades to buildings they do not live in, and whose lobbying organizations have fought efforts to require them. Last year, the California South Coast Air Quality Management District proposed rules intended to accelerate the replacement of gas furnaces and water heaters with electric alternatives. The rules would have imposed fees on new gas appliances and set targets for sales of electric equipment, potentially affecting some 10 million furnaces and water heaters across Southern California. But an enormous opposition campaign that included SoCalGas, the California Apartment Association, and Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles helped kill the bill, with the South Coast AQMD board rejecting it 7–5. The California Apartment Association, which represents the rental housing industry, has also joined a broad coalition bringing a lawsuit to challenge a rule that requires property owners to replace certain gas-fired water heaters and boilers with electric alternatives. The lawsuit makes the same legal argument that successfully overturned Berkeley’s landmark 2019 gas ban for new buildings. That decision forced cities, including Los Angeles, to reconsider their own gas bans and has complicated the broader push to decarbonize buildings. While spending millions lobbying and litigating to undermine climate progress, these actors invoke environmental concerns to deny their tenants cooling when convenient. In a letter opposing the proposal for a right to cooling in Los Angeles City, the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles argued that “there are many other active cooling technologies that are far more environmentally friendly than air conditioning,” pointing instead to “tree canopies, solar shades, and blackout curtains,” even while conceding that these measures “cannot typically provide as much cooling as active technologies especially in high heat areas such as the San Fernando Valley.” For a renter, climate adaptation and climate mitigation depend on the same person: their landlord. Which brings us back to Natalia’s window. Natalia’s landlord wouldn’t allow her to install an air conditioner. Neither would Beatrizl’s, citing aesthetics. Neither would Daniela’s, whose windows could accommodate only a unit protruding from the building, which her landlord did not allow. Maribel’s lease prohibited anything in the windows at all. What looks from Paris like a question of excessive individual consumption appeared rather different from inside these apartments. These women were not choosing between a heat pump and an inefficient air conditioner, between renewable and fossil-generated electricity, or between a well-insulated apartment and a poorly insulated one. They do not get to make any of those choices. Paris and Los Angeles are not actually deciding between two futures, one environmentally responsible and one air-conditioned. The real choice is between dirty, unequal cooling and clean, universal cooling. The first is what you get if you simply let the market respond. The second requires government intervention upstream to clean the grid, regulate refrigerants, retrofit buildings, manufacture heat pumps, and impose health and safety standards that regulate temperatures within homes. The obstacle is not that we lack the imagination or the technology to keep people cool without destroying the climate. It is that the buildings and energy systems on which everyone depends are controlled by private owners whose interest in protecting the value of their property and profits override our social interest in protecting the planet and ourselves. Chelsea Kirk is a policy director at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy. She co-founded the Rent Brigade after the Los Angeles wildfires to document and combat illegal rent gouging.