About a month ago, I sat down to write what was supposed to be a straightforward article about air conditioning.
It was “getting my goat” to read the American commentary surrounding the recent European heatwaves – specifically, the myopic, almost condescending viewpoint across social media asking why Europeans didn’t just go out and buy AC units “… and save your grandma’s life.”
Now, I am certainly in no position to throw stones. Growing up in Connecticut, I have fond, almost comical memories of mid-summer nights spent snuggled under layers of heavy blankets in winter pajamas, purely because my family kept our home’s air conditioning set to an Arctic tundra level. I grew up inside that exact culture of abundance.
So, I get it. When you’re hot, you turn a dial. Problem solved. Except, as I sat down to lay out the hard facts about AC’s contributions to climate change, the whole exercise started feeling like a fool’s errand.
The information about air conditioning is straightforward, even if we prefer to ignore it. Air conditioners do not magically make heat disappear. They function like giant refrigerators. To cool the inside of your home, they cycle hot air outdoors.
As Aarhus University professor Steffen Petersen pointed out during this summer’s heatwave, widespread AC installation creates a harmful thermodynamic feedback loop – it physically heats up the outdoors while simultaneously pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to fuel the power grid. And it doesn’t matter if you are using a modern air conditioning or cooling system, a central air conditioner, window air conditioners, or even a more low-tech air conditioning unit, the act of cooling the air inside raises the heat outdoors.
According to the International Energy Agency, 90% of American households have air conditioning, compared to roughly 20% in Europe. By 2050, global space cooling alone will consume as much electricity as all of China and India combined today.
When I lived in Denmark, I saw the alternative firsthand. It isn’t that Europeans enjoy suffering. It is that their homes were historically engineered around a completely different set of assumptions. Danish architecture relied on thick masonry walls, strategic room placement relative to the sun, deep roof overhangs that block high summer heat while letting in low winter light, and the daily habit of night-air purging – meaning, opening windows when the evening cools down to flush out warm air and cool the interior.
There are countless low-tech, passive interventions from awnings and window blinds to shade trees and green roofs that keep buildings livable without locking us all into a forever reliance on fossil fuels with infrastructure like expanding the energy grid to meet a higher demand while encouraging households to invest in AC units.
So why didn’t I just publish a simple article focused on alerting us all to the determinants of AC while pointing out other ways to cool our homes? Just something aimed at opening up perspectives and thinking about climate-friendly alternatives?
Because as I sat staring at my screen, that familiar, overwhelming feeling began rising in my chest, the one that makes me want to scream from the rooftops – Why isn’t anyone doing anything to save the planet?!
OMG, I know! I promise, I try to keep my cool (pun intended) most of the time.
As a children’s book author focused on climate education, I work hard to keep my message hopeful, positive, and rooted in practical action. But sometimes, the sheer inertia of our culture awakens a demon inside of me.
So, I went down a rabbit hole trying to understand why we are so stubbornly attached to solutions that make the core problem worse. And the question I kept circling back to, the one I’ve been wrestling with, is this… Are we all just simply too self-absorbed?
Ouch. My apologies if that offends.
A friend in Denmark recently said to me, “People are conservative with their habits.” What she meant was that human beings are creatures of habit. We like what we know, and we resist changing our routines. Essentially, we are all loyal to our current ways of life and don’t spend any time contemplating new habits – at least those that are related to our carbon footprint.
And when I say “self-absorbed,” I don’t mean it as a cartoonish insult. Self-absorbed simply means being so wrapped up in your own immediate thoughts, comfort, and schedules that you completely miss the needs, signals, and long-term consequences impacting the world around you.
Maybe this is a good time to insert the UN’s definition of sustainability, “…meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Unfortunately for many of our habits, this requires real change.
Just yesterday, we visited my dad’s house. My 15-year-old daughter, Luna, had a plastic container from lunch, and my dad casually said, “Oh, just leave it here.”
He had a small pile of items meant for recycling, but I noticed a glass jar sitting in the trash can. Luna’s container needed to be washed out first, and as I stood there, I caught myself wondering, when it comes down to it, will this container actually get washed and placed in the recycling, or will it just get tossed in the trash because that’s easier?
We ended up taking the container home, washing it, and putting it in our own recycling bin.
Now, I know the defensive pushback that usually follows a story like that is, “Well, you know only 9% of plastic actually gets recycled anyway, right?”
I promise to write a whole separate post about why non-sustainable people love weaponizing system flaws against sustainable people as an excuse to do nothing. (Spoiler alert – We already know the system is broken. Pointing it out doesn’t make us stop trying. It just makes us worry more about the future!)
The point isn’t the plastic container. The point is the internal default.
We have normalized an extreme level of individualism. Americas score a 91 out of 100 on the Hofstede Index of Individualism, the highest in the world, where personal convenience almost always overrides collective stewardship. Argh!
So, we are wired for convenience and loyal to the habits that prioritize it. And this is why I was struggling trying to just talk about AC. I want us to be motivated to create the kind of change that is required for us to dramatically shift the trajectory of the climate crisis.
When scientists publish climate projections, they almost always point to 2100 as the critical threshold. To most adults, 2100 feels like abstract science fiction. It’s a date comfortably far away, allowing us to quietly pass the buck to “future generations.”
For me that goalpost sits directly in my heart. My daughter, Luna, is 15. At the turn of the century, she will be in her 80s. 2100 is not a sci-fi movie. It is her literal lifetime – and almost certainly my future grandchildren’s lifetime.
And here’s the thing, we don’t really know how things may domino, accelerating far beyond predictions. Passing the buck is not a viable option.
There is a quiet conversation and thought process operating in the background of life that suggests we can just keep living limitlessly for another 15 or 20 years, until today’s youth grow up, enter leadership roles, and fix the crisis we handed them.
I worry deeply about that timeline. Luna will graduate from college around 2033.
By the time she and her peers gain the experience needed to reach positions of real political and corporate power, it will be 2045 or 2050. By then, the domino effects of runaway emissions may have already tipped. And honestly, every fiber of my parental body just screams that I cannot pass this world to my daughter in worse shape than I received it!
Are we really going to sit back, blast our AC to 65°F, and expect our children to clean up a planet they didn’t mess up?
I am calling out to all the adults in the room today – everyone between the ages of 30 and 85 -we are the last generation with the active window of opportunity to shift the trajectory. We benefited most from fossil-fueled convenience, and we have to be the primary source of the solutions.
If being “self-absorbed” just means we’ve been paying attention to the wrong things, then the fix is surprisingly straightforward – we start paying attention to something bigger than our immediate comfort.
We don’t need to live in caves or ban modern amenities. But we do need to break away from our conservative loyalty to old habits that no longer serve us:
- Trade Instant Cooling for Smart Habits: Channel your grandmother’s wisdom before reaching for the thermostat. Close the blinds during peak sun hours, open the windows for nighttime ventilation, use ceiling fans, and accept a little summer warmth as a normal part of being alive.
- Shift the Default Question: Before grabbing a single-use item, tossing food scraps into the garbage, or setting the thermostat to a freezer setting, pause and ask: “Is this choice serving my long-term values, or just my daily convenience?”
- Bring Individual Action Mainstream: Saving the planet isn’t a niche hobby for “environmentalists.” It’s basic humanity. Talk about your swaps, ask your local town board about clean energy, and model the behavior you want to see.
You can dislike me for asking if we’re self-absorbed – I am completely fine taking the heat (pun intended again). But if it prompts us to pause, look beyond our immediate bubbles, and make choices that prepare a world worth inheriting, then every uncomfortable conversation is worth it.
References:
Aucock, A. (2025, August 11). The UK is experiencing increasingly frequent heatwaves – here’s why air-con isn’t the answer. https://eia-international.org. Retrieved July 23, 2026, from https://eia-international.org/blog/the-uk-is-experiencing-increasingly-frequent-heatwaves-heres-why-air-con-isnt-the-answer/
Ritchie, H. (2024, July 29). Air conditioning causes around 3% of greenhouse gas emissions. How will this change in the future? Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/air-conditioning-causes-around-greenhouse-gas-emissions-will-change-future
Freakonomics. (2024, November 26). The Pros and Cons of America’s (Extreme) individualism – Freakonomics. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-pros-and-cons-of-americas-extreme-individualism-ep-470-2/
