Air con?
Not taking climate uncertainty seriously enough
Humanity throughout the world has derived enormous benefit from the relative climate stability of the past 117 centuries. (A benefit that, it should be said, has not been used particularly wisely). Here in Britain we famously grumble about the weather, but, compared with most countries at the same latitude, our winters have been comparatively mild, and our summers warm rather than hot. Until recently, that is.
Climate stability has come to an end. Global average temperatures will soon be more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels - the limit that was set at the 2015 Paris climate conference. Temperatures are rising faster in Europe than in other continents, thanks to our proximity to a warming Arctic and the increased frequency of extreme heatwaves.
This June Britain experienced a particularly extreme heatwave. A relatively rare weather event, the formation of a heat dome over Europe, was supercharged by the now familiar impacts on weather patterns of greenhouse gas emissions and nature destruction. The result was record June temperatures that for many days rose well above 30C.
While short term weather forecasts have become more reliable, longer term changes have become more unpredictable. It’s not just climate change we now face, it’s climate uncertainty as well :
“As ice melts, some places can cool … Our actions have inadvertently created a hot new world that is more and more difficult to understand, let alone predict, let alone ‘control’ ”
(Rupert Read, The Coming Climate Uncertainty Conundrum, DeSmog 23 Jan 2025)
Something we have yet to experience in Britain is the significantly colder winters that will, counter-intuitively, result from global warming being allowed to continue. This is because of the weakening and possible breakdown of AMOC (the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) which occurs when increased meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet dilutes the ocean current that brings warmer seawater from the tropics to north west Europe. The latest research suggests AMOC is likely to weaken by around a half over the next 70 years. Precisely how cold that would make our winters is impossible to predict. What is certain is that they would be much colder than we are used to.
Air con culture wars
It was perhaps inevitable that Britain’s recent experience of extreme heatwaves would spark a new culture war, this time focused on attitudes to air con.
From one side, consuming energy to power air con was seen as equivalent to pouring petrol on a fire - boosting the very consumption of fossil fuels that was the prime cause of temperatures becoming so unbearably hot. Some went further, and suggested that promotion of air con was a plot by fossil fuel corporations - not just to sell us more energy-consuming equipment, but to get us to accept global warming, and lull us into thinking there was no need to take action against extraction of fossil fuels. One post claimed that air con was installed by rich Texans to enable them to sit by an open fire all year round without feeling uncomfortably hot in the summer months.
From the other side, opposition to air con was seen as a plot by green activists to punish climate change deniers, and force them them to accept changes to their life style that would cut their energy consumption. Some went further, and insisted that concern about global warming was just a cover for a sadistic desire to deprive others of their liberty - “At least old fashioned tyrants had the balls to use force directly” was one complaint.
The culture war conflict soon spilt over into mainstream politics. Claire Coutinho, the Conservative opposition’s Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, posted a video on X claiming that the UK government was discouraging air con because it was trying to persuade us that using energy was wrong, instead of boosting the growth she believed the economy needed.. Building regulations, she suggested, were blocking people’s comfort:
“Are you hot? Are you sweating? Did you get a bad night’s sleep? Your life probably would have been much better if you had air con. But our building regulations are blocking Brits from enjoying the cool air that you could have had almost anywhere else in the world … End the air con ban, and make Britain cool again.”
(Claire Coutinho, video on X, 27 May 2026)
Coutinho’s claim was factually incorrect - there are planning restrictions on the installation of air con on listed buildings and in conservation areas, and official advice suggests passive cooling methods such as shading and ventilation should be considered before air con, but there is no blanket ban. The claim was based not on reality but on what would go down well on social media.
Mitigation and adaptation
Too often climate action is understood as a choice between mitigation and adaptation - do we try to stop global warming, or do we make sure we can cope with the changing climate? It’s a false dichotomy - both are needed.
Mitigation is needed to slow the pace of change and minimise the harm it causes (to nature, food supplies, and infrastructure as well as to human productivity and comfort). Adaptation is needed alongside mitigation to help us survive changes that it’s too late to avoid.
Occasional severe heat waves are already baked into our weather system as a result of the accumulation of past emissions in the atmosphere, and it would take decades, even with extensive decarbonisation of energy supply and rewilding of land, before underlying summer temperatures could return to less damaging and more comfortable levels.
James Hansen and Andy Burnham
The testimony of climate scientist James Hansen to the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in June 1988 significantly improved popular understanding of climate change. Here Hansen made public his 99% confidence that human-caused greenhouse gases were affecting the climate and bringing about long-term warming. His testimony coincided with an exceptionally hot summer. This brought home to some of the listening politicians the seriousness of the situation, and the need to cut back on fossil fuel production if heatwaves occurring more often and with greater severity were to be avoided.
The committee chair, Senator Tim Wirth, admitted afterwards that he had deliberately scheduled the hearing for a day that was forecast to be particularly hot. He had also ordered his staff to open the hearing room’s windows the night before to disable the air con, ensuring that committee members would be in no doubt as to what a hotter climate in the future would feel like. (Hansen later regretted that he had not used the opportunity to highlight that global warming involved more extreme storms and flooding as well as more intense heatwaves - “I should have emphasised more strongly that both extremes increase with global warming”, he wrote in his 2009 book Storms of My Grandchildren).
38 years after Hansen’s testimony, Andy Burnham was in Manchester, at the People’s History Museum, making his first policy speech as Britain’s Prime Minister in waiting. We had all suffered from the country’s highest ever June temperatures the previous week, which would have been an ideal context to support a bold programme of action to combat climate breakdown. But Burnham did not need any such context, because there was no mention in his speech of the climate, or of nature breakdown more generally. Tackling the climate and nature crises should have been at the heart of his ‘vision’. They didn’t feature at all.
I’m not sure that Zack Polanski’s Green Party would be any better. On 1 July James Meadway, an economist who advises Polanski, used his weekly macrodose podcast to cover heatwaves, Burnham’s speech, and economic shocks. He managed to do this as if these were three separate issues, without identifying any links between them or drawing appropriate policy conclusons from their interaction.
Community resilience
There were a number of themes in Burnham’s speech that could have been developed into a coherent programme to build both community and climate resilience. He talked, for example, about putting “place first”, and the need “to build resilience in places across the country in an increasingly uncertain world”. He qualified obligatory references to growth by always referring to “good growth” - growth that “can only be nurtured from the bottom up”, a growth which “comes from committing to decent infrastructure in all parts of the UK.”
There could be links here with what environmental philosopher Rupert Read has emphasised about the importance of community resilience:
“Many of the measures that would make us more resilient would also make our lives better … More local food production, healthier landscapes, stronger communities, less waste and a closer relationship with the natural systems that sustain us are not ‘sacrifices’ demanded by an ecological emergency. They are positive goods in themselves. There is a fortunate convergence between what is needed for security and what is needed for human flourishing … Resilience is not merely instrumental, it is a civic virtue.”
(Rupert Read, Build resilience or be shaped by crisis, Resilience 22 Jun 2026)
Community spaces
Some themes in Burnham’s speech could also relate to economist Mariana Mazzucato’s insights about a ‘common good compass’, one which in her case integrates community, climate, and nature concerns:
“A common good compass can help point us in the direction of a just transition that encompasses the interconnected layers of the climate crisis like emissions, water and biodiversity while also keeping justice and fairness at the centre.”
(Mariana Mazzucato, The Common Good Economy, 2026)
Mazzucato has recently advised Burnham on some of the most effective projects he delivered as Mayor of Greater Manchester (Burnham, Trump condescendingly informs us, was until a month ago a “mayor of a town” ). Mazzucato’s emphasis in her latest book on the importance of community spaces (community centres, youth centres, social clubs, libraries, church halls, and the like) is particularly relevant:
‘These local institutions that sustain community life … are the spaces where communities form, identities are shaped and civic participation flourishes. In difficult times, they offer refuge and uphold community cohesion, while in more stable periods they strengthen our social fabric and allow us to imagine and build the future together. Yet their benefits are often intangible and difficult to measure, so these spaces are routinely undervalued.”
(Mariana Mazzucato, The Common Good Economy, 2026)
Repurposing air con
Is there a possibility here of rescuing air con from the online culture wars battleground, and employing it productively, as part of a mission to build both community and climate resilience? Shaping policy to encourage its installation not so much in the houses of those rich enough to afford it but in community spaces that can provide refuge for communities from heatwaves in summer and from cold spells in winter? (modern air con is provided by air-to-air heat pumps, that can cool the indoor environment when it’s hot, and warm it when it’s cold).
For Burnham to become relevant he would need to allow creative responses to the climate and nature crises into his vision. Air con for community spaces, powered by rooftop solar and battery storage, could be one way to effectively integrate community resilience with climate resilience.
Such an approach could also help build some political resilience. Community resilience is popular. It could be a vote winner. Yet a Trump-supported and Farage-led Reform UK government remains a distinct possibility after the next General Election. Such a government would be disastrous for communities, the climate, and nature. But resilient community spaces would be hard for Farage to erase And they could become not just refuges in which to shelter from the climate disruption that his fossil fuel obsession would intensify, but centres of political resistance as well.