On dying of thrift in the wrong season

National Review reports that heat-related illness killed an estimated 24,400 people across Europe's urbanized areas in 2025. I have spent enough time in Philadelphia summers, and enough time watching what happens when a working family cannot afford to insulate a roof or glaze a window, to know that this number is not a statistic — it is a ledger of preventable losses.

The common objection to air-conditioning in much of Europe runs something like this: the technology is expensive, the energy use is ruinous to the climate, and the continent has managed without it for centuries. I have sympathy for the first concern and real respect for the second. But "we have always done without" is not a principle — it is a habit, and habits must be examined when they begin to kill 24,000 of our neighbors in a single warm season. As I once observed in a different context, the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. (That saying, I confess, has been attributed to me without firm evidence; I endorse the sentiment whether or not I first coined it.)

The household economy question is this: who, precisely, is dying? It is not, as a rule, the prosperous resident of a well-built modern apartment with thick walls, a green courtyard, and the means to escape to cooler ground in August. It is the elderly pensioner in a top-floor flat with a metal roof. It is the low-wage worker who cannot afford the electricity bill even if a window unit were provided. Heat death, like most forms of avoidable suffering, falls unequally — and that unequal falling is a public matter, not a private one.

I was a printer and a postmaster before I was anything else, and I knew that infrastructure which serves the whole community justly — a reliable postal road, a well-lit public street, a clean water supply — repays its cost many times over in the productive years it preserves. Cooling infrastructure, whether that means better-insulated public housing, shaded urban streets, publicly accessible cool spaces, or subsidized efficient units for low-income households, is exactly that kind of investment. The miser who refuses to spend a shilling on a fire bucket has no standing to complain when the warehouse burns.

On the energy and climate side of the ledger I will speak with appropriate humility, since the engineering of modern power grids and refrigerants lies well beyond anything I could have known. But the principle is familiar: an instrument that imposes real costs on others — and excess heat drawn into the atmosphere does impose such costs — must be disciplined by those costs being visible and fairly borne. Subsidize efficient cooling for those who cannot afford it; price the energy honestly; invest in the grid so the power does not fail on the hottest afternoon of the year. None of that is radical. It is housekeeping at the civic scale.

Counsel for the working person: If you live in a warm climate and lack adequate cooling, do not treat that lack as a virtue. Seek out the publicly available cool spaces in your city — libraries, community centers, public buildings. And if you have a voice in local politics, use it to ask whether your municipality has a heat-emergency plan that reaches the most vulnerable residents, not merely those who can afford to help themselves.