The British food vlogger tried barbecue in Dallas, bagels in New York and cheesesteaks in Philadelphia, but when he returned to England from his World Cup trip, another American specialty dominated his thoughts.
“Absolute bliss,” he recalled. “The best thing in the world.”
That would be air conditioning.
Jono Yates, 39, fixated on the 62-degree comfort of his Hilton hotel suites like a man tormented by forbidden love. They probably weren’t meant to be — the YouTuber and the cool blast. Could he actually splurge on a system he’d use maybe a few weeks each year? Or was it months now?
Summer in his city, Cheshire, was getting hotter as Europe suffered its most blistering heat wave on record. Schools shuttered. Train tracks warped. Dozens regionwide have died from heatstroke and drowning. Brits sought relief in bathtubs and baby pools in a nation where an estimated 4 percent of households had what Yates called “air-con,” compared with approximately 20 percent on the European continent and 90 percent in the United States.
The World Cup is drawing hundreds of thousands of international tourists to one of the most climate-controlled places on Earth, introducing soccer fans to the sensation of getting goose bumps at a Buc-ee’s gas station. In bars and restaurants, shuttle vans and stadiums, visitors gushed about their dry-armpit experiences before heading back to countries where a combination of cost, custom and environmental consciousness made America’s level of artificial chill a near impossibility.
In the week since he unpacked his suitcase, Yates had been sweating in “the shortest shorts known to man,” he said, while tossing ice chips to his panting shih tzu, George Michael. His electric fans blew hot air.
Escaping this inferno, he knew, required more than cash. Installing AC simply wasn’t the British thing to do. He’d have to break a stiff-upper-lip mentality and make peace with a trade-off that Europeans tend to view as taboo: Air-con accelerates global warming.
Still, his mind kept wandering back to a Starbucks he had visited in Los Angeles.
“It was so temperate,” he moaned. “So beautiful.”
Invented 124 years ago in Brooklyn, what the U.S. government lauds as “one of the most important inventions of modern times” became an American staple by the 1960s, bigfooting greener cooling techniques embraced elsewhere in the world. Developers could “build the same box in any climate,” one architecture professor lamented, thanks to the rise of power-guzzling, temperature-lowering machines.
Cue the transatlantic culture clash. In Europe, where homes tend to be older and climes fairer, residents mainly favored cross-ventilation over machines that leaders cast as pricey spewers of greenhouse gas emissions. “It’s like living in a sealed jar,” one French columnist complained of AC in 1994. “It’s unbearable.”
This week, as their home countries faced perilous heat that researchers warn has become more common, some European travelers swapped the teasing for awe.
“It’s like stepping into a fridge!” exclaimed one British journalist in a TikTok post.
Another offered a lighthearted Instagram concession.
“One thing the World Cup has taught me is that Americans might be onto something with this air conditioning stuff,” mused Victor Vacheron, a 35-year-old comedian and software designer.
Scrolling through clips of his fellow Europeans discovering America’s cultural quirks, he reflected on the mounting heat-inflicted deaths in Europe, the fastest-warming continent. At home in Brighton, Vacheron was lucky enough to hole up somewhere safe, even if his “heat dome” refuge was little more than the bathroom with the lights off.
Vacheron wasn’t sure if mass AC adoption was the answer. Perhaps cleaner interventions, like stronger insulation and more green spaces, could save lives. Managing extreme weather, he noted, was sparking political debate across Europe. One of the heads of France’s far-right National Rally party, for instance, just pledged to back a “massive” air-conditioning plan.
“When we were growing up, it was so rare to have the kind of temperatures we are having now, that it was like, ‘We’re not going to rework the whole infrastructure for two or three days,’” Vacheron said. “But now ‘two or three days’ is summer.”
Not that the American way is universally appealing.
At a Germany-vs.-Ecuador watch party Thursday in the nation’s muggy capital, Juni Hoppe said she preferred to keep her windows open for moral and, well, sensory reasons.
“I don’t like the annoying zhuhhhhhhh sound,” said the pastor, 37, who moved to Washington from Berlin in September.
On broiling days, however, she enjoyed not sweating through her jeans. Pitchers, the bar where she gathered with other Germans, had set the temperature to what the owner called a “sensible 72.” It was fine, she thought, though one of her countrymen had asked if they could make the room warmer.
Growing up, her family didn’t have AC. She couldn’t think of anyone who did. People mostly opened the windows at morning and night and avoided strenuous activity during peak rays.
Hoppe was still negotiating a relationship that felt healthy with the central air in her D.C. apartment. On the days she adjusted the thermostat downward, she liked to travel by bus rather than car.
“To offset the emissions,” she said.
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