As extreme heat becomes the norm on the continent, the AC culture wars may be solved by advances in environmentally friendly technology.
If you're reading this while the blinds are drawn against yet another heat wave and wondering whether it’s finally time to buy an air conditioner, you're far from alone. At the end of June, as temperatures climbed well above 40 degrees Celsius across Europe, shoppers in France literally forced their way into stores to snatch up portable fans and ACs before they sold out. Such scenes are likely to become more common. As the planet warms, the demand for cooling is rising worldwide. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts two-thirds of households could own an AC by 2050.
Politicians are, of course, turning ACs into a weapon in their broader culture wars. Far-right figure Marine Le Pen pledged to roll out air-conditioning across France if her party comes to power, while the British Conservatives vowed to overturn net-zero rules that restrict AC installation in new builds. On the left, the argument runs that air-conditioning would mainly benefit the rich and not those who need it most. It would also lock Europe into the same high-energy cooling spiral seen in the US and Asia. To date, only around 20 percent of Europeans have AC at home (and a mere 4 percent in the UK), compared with roughly 90 percent in the US, where electricity is considerably cheaper.
In Europe, air-conditioning is no longer just about comfort. It helps adults stay productive through extreme heat, and children concentrate in poorly ventilated schools. It helps people nod off when the air is still stiflingly warm long after sunset. It can even save lives. One research group estimated that air-conditioning prevented nearly 200,000 premature deaths among people over 65 in 2019 alone.
Europe is warming faster than any other continent, and countries that once had relatively mild summers are now experiencing increasingly frequent and intense heat waves. Research by Nicole Miranda and her colleagues at the University of Oxford suggests that countries such as the UK, Switzerland, Norway, and Finland could see some of the largest relative increases in heat exposure and cooling demand if global warming reaches 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels.
“We will need more cooling to protect people”, says Miranda, a senior lecturer in engineering and carbon reduction manager at the university. “The question is how to provide it in a way that is efficient, equitable, and smart. Not by panic-buying inefficient, energy-intensive portable ACs.”
June’s record-breaking heat wave offered a glimpse of what lies ahead. In northern Europe, homes and offices built to retain heat during long winters turned into ovens. A recent report by the UK's Climate Change Committee warns that by mid-century, over 90 percent of existing homes could overheat during severe heat waves. Even further south, centuries-old architectural adaptations—such as thick stone walls, white-painted façades, blinds and small windows designed to block the sun—are reaching their limits. People in Europe are already fed up with the extreme heat.
But simply adding more air-conditioning is not necessarily the answer—at least not in its current form. Because air-conditioning is built on a paradox: The machines that keep us cool are also heating the planet. The electricity they consume already accounts for roughly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, slightly more than the aviation industry. “We expect cooling to become one of the biggest drivers of electricity demand growth worldwide, along with data centers,” says Fabian Voswinkel, an energy-efficiency policy analyst at the IEA. With new units being installed worldwide every minute, electricity demand for space cooling could more than triple by 2050.
Solar power will help cut emissions, but it won’t clear air-conditioning’s bad reputation. Conventional ACs still run on a century-old principle: refrigerants cycle between liquid and gas to pull heat out of rooms and dump it outside. Manufacturers continue to refine the technology, but many of the refrigerants remain problematic. Fluorinated gases, for instance, have a global warming potential thousands of times greater than CO2 if they leak into the atmosphere. The EU therefore introduced a regulation in 2024 to phase them out gradually. “In the next few years, air conditioners and heat pumps using these gases won't even be able to be sold here”, says Voswinkel. But alternative gases bring their own trade-offs: Propane is highly flammable, while ammonia is toxic.
This impasse has led some scientists and companies back to the drawing board to ask: Instead of searching for a better refrigerant, what if air-conditioning systems didn’t need one at all? Their answer lies in materials that change temperature when exposed to external forces—a field known as solid-state cooling, which could revolutionize how we cool the air around us.
Paul Motzki, professor of smart material systems at Saarland University in Germany, heads an EU-funded scientific consortium focusing on nickel-titanium. When the metal is stretched and released, it snaps back to its original shape, absorbing heat from its surroundings and generating what is known as an elastocaloric cooling effect. In practice, the technology could be used to cool rooms by 5 to 10 degrees C and, according to Motzki, do so even more efficiently than conventional AC systems today. The team is currently testing the prototype in the lab, but expects to deploy it in new buildings within the next few years. If the technology works, it “could lead to disruption, even a paradigm shift, because the technology is so different from established cooling systems,” Motzki says. The group is collaborating with Irish company Exergyn, which is also developing a refrigerant-free heat pump.
Brooklyn-based Mimic Systems has developed a heat pump based on semiconductive materials capable of moving heat in and out of rooms when an electric current passes through. The prototype is being tested in an apartment in Vancouver. Magnotherm, a spinoff from the Technical University of Darmstadt, is using magnetic fields in refrigerators and will test its prototype in a German supermarket chain later this year before taking on air-conditioning. In the UK, University of Cambridge spinoff Barocal is experimenting with flexible plastic crystals that, when squashed and released in a pressurized chamber, release heat. The startup recently raised USD 10 million in seed funding.
Motzki says Europe is clearly at the forefront in solid-state cooling, including in efforts to bring the technology to market. “I see a major opportunity for Europe to achieve technological leadership all the way through to market maturity,” he adds. “Of course, this will all depend heavily on private capital and public funding.”
Lindsay Rasmussen sees the same potential. At Third Derivative, a climate-tech accelerator founded by the US nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, she works with startups such as Mimic Systems and Magnotherm on next-generation cooling. She stresses that solid-state cooling technologies are still in their early stages—promising, but unproven at scale. But “the space can move quickly if the right capital and partnerships are in place.”
The real question is not just whether these new technologies will work, but who will scale them and how quickly. History suggests the path won’t be linear, nor will it necessarily stay in Europe. Solar photovoltaics, for instance, began with research breakthroughs in Europe, moved into commercialization in the US, and ultimately scaled in Asia through vertically integrated supply chains. Solid-state cooling could follow a similar trajectory. As Rasmussen explains, innovations typically leave the lab and startups once they become commercially viable and are picked up by major manufacturers. Today’s cooling market is already dominated by multinational conglomerates such as Daikin and Samsung, which closely track emerging technologies and are ready to move quickly.
As the world rushes to cool itself, one reality risks getting lost: Installing more air conditioners will not, on its own, solve Europe's overheating problem. Many of its cities trap heat in tightly packed buildings and concrete streets, and the challenge is how to cool them without compromising the aesthetics that make them so distinctive.
Both University of Oxford researcher Miranda and IEA analyst Voswinkel call for a “cooling hierarchy”: The priority should be preventing buildings from overheating in the first place—through trees, shade, reflective materials, and natural ventilation. Active cooling should come later, focused on the places that need it most, such as schools, hospital wards, and care homes. From Paris, where he is based, Voswinkel points to one efficient example: Ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics, the city expanded its district heating network to also distribute chilled river water through underground pipelines, cooling public buildings. “I think that these heat waves are making more and more policymakers realize that we have to face this new reality and make good plans,” he says.
You gotta read and watch some old books and films that aren’t 100% modern politically correct. I’m not saying you should agree with everything in them but you need to learn where genres came from to understand what those genres are doing today and where media deconstructing old tropes is coming from.
Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.
When we choose to avoid history because it's Problematic or Says Bad Things, we are choosing to divorce ourselves from understanding how we came from that time to this one, which makes it even more likely for the cycle to repeat, with no one but a few people with shelves of old books aware that it's happened before.
and this shit's important. Media from the past tells us how people from the past acted and thought and behaved.
Plus, a lot of these media pieces were socially acceptable and/or progressive for their time. For example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while it contains a lot of words and ideas that are offensive now, was very progressive for its time. The book is a statement piece for how a young man who's grown up in a racist environment, with no words to explain himself other than racist and bigoted ones, decides that the whole system is shit and he's not going to follow those rules any more. So not reading or engaging with it because it uses the n-word a lot really misses the point.
On Saturday I said to my partner, as I have said for months, "A ten thousand dollar a year raise would solve so many of my problems."
As of this morning I was reluctantly looking for jobs because I love my job and don't want to leave it, but see: $10k raise problem solver.
As of noon today this was no longer an issue, because my boss called me with the news that I was getting a $10K merit raise.
I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. This is roughly $200 extra per paycheck. Enough to pay off debt faster, rebuild my savings, and spend a weekend a month in Milwaukee getting obscenely laid. The sex I'm going to have on $200 extra per paycheck. You can't even.
May all of you get the $10K raise your soul has yearned for. And whatever level of sex you can be satisfied with for $200.
This is about the sexiness of The Golden Girls but I really feel the need to remind the world of how fucking progressive this show was.
In the episode 72 hours, we find out Rose may have contracted AIDs during an emergency gallbladder surgery.
Rose: Why me, Blanche? I'm tired of pretending I feel okay so you won't say, 'Take it easy', and I'm tired of you saying 'Take it easy' because you're afraid I'm going to fall apart. Dammit, why is this happening to me? I mean, this isn't supposed to happen to people like me. You must've gone to bed with hundreds of men. All I had was one innocent operation.
Blanche: Hey, wait a minute! Are you saying this should be me and not you?
Rose: No! No, I'm just saying that I am a good person. Hell, I'm a goody-two-shoes!
Blanche: AIDS is not a bad person's disease, Rose, it is not God punishin' people for their sins!
In Isn't it romantic? we find out Dorothy's childhood best friend is a lesbian who recently lost her partner. She confesses she has feelings for Rose. Rose turns her down but makes it clear that she still wants to be friends even though she doesn't return those feelings.
Sophia: Jean is a nice person. She happens to like girls instead of guys. Some people like cats instead of dogs.
Jean: Rose, about last night. I should never have said anything.
Rose: You only said what you were feeling.
Jean: It's just that this last year has been so difficult for me. Pat was the person I planned to spend the rest of my life with. And when she died, I just felt so terribly alone. Empty. I thought I could never care for anyone again. Until I met you. I just got very confused. I hope I didn't make you uncomfortable.
Rose: Well, I have to admit that I don't understand these kinds of feelings. But if I did understand, if I were, you know, like you, I'd be very flattered and proud that you thought of me that way.
Ebbtide's Revenge gives us Phil's funeral, and Sophia addressing him wearing women's clothes.
Rose: So what if he was different? It's okay that you loved him.
Sophia: I did love him. He was my son, my little boy. But every time I saw him I wondered what I did, what I said, when was the day I did whatever I did to make him the way he was.
Angela Petrillo: What he was Sophia, was a good man.
Sister of the Bride, where Blanche's brother Clayton brings his boyfriend to town, because they're planning on getting married.
Blanche: Oh, look, I can accept the fact that he's gay, but why does he have to slip a ring on this guy's finger so the whole world will know?
Sophia: Why did you marry George?
Blanche: We loved each other. We wanted to make a lifetime commitment. Wanted everybody to know.
Sophia: That's what Doug and Clayton want, too. Everyone wants someone to grow old with. And shouldn't everyone have that chance?
There are so many episodes I could sit here and quote but this show is still so important. It isn't perfect, there are jokes that definitely don't land that I will not sit here and defend, but in the context of when it was created? This show is a fucking masterpiece and deserves respect for that.
In case anyone hasn't heard, the cyclospora outbreak affecting tons of people in the US right now is coming from Taylor Farms produce. Best to stay away from bagged lettuce and prepared salads completely right now, but especially the ones mentioned in the screenshot:
Taylor Farms
Earthbound Farms
Little Salad Bar (Aldi)
Marketside (Walmart)
Kroger House Brand
Target private label greens
Costco salads and greens etc
Trader Joe's chopped salad kits and fresh produce
Fast food: McDonalds, Taco Bell, (Yum! Brands), Chipotle, Subway, Pizza Hut, KFC, Olive Garden, Top Golf, Red Lobster, Burger King, etc.
This is not the first time I've heard about a Taylor Farms foodborne illness outbreak. I stopped eating their salads after reading a description of the conditions in their facilities. Doesn't sound like they've improved anything.
We need a fully funded and staffed FDA, and regulations with teeth - and that's exactly what we don't have under Trump. To make things worse, the CDC is no longer tracking these outbreaks. We're on our own.
Here's the recall notice with a full list of what not to eat. Important to note the problem appears to be the iceberg lettuce, so if you have a salad mix in the fridge that does NOT have iceberg lettuce, so far there is no sign it is a problem.
If you eat it and shit yourself, please make a report.
I wanted to use what ‘reach’ I may have here to share the Carolina Wildlife Center’s urgent plea for donations. If they are unable to raise $75,000 to cover ongoing and future care of their wildlife patients, the center will have to close July 20th, 2026. The services provided by CWC to the community are incredibly valuable, and without them, many wild animals will suffer without the care they need.
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a “common childhood illness” with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since “smallpox isn’t that bad.”) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, “aren’t they the same thing?”
One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination
Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!
There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):
Smallpox:
Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)
There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)
There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.
Other relevant viruses:
Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.
Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.
Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.
So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?
There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.
Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)
Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.
Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).
Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.
Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.
TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).
(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)
Sources & further reading under the cut!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
I kind of do think "this is not who we are, we need to live up to our democratic heritage" is a winning message in a way "america is basically and fundamentally evil. fuck you all" isn't
#we've often failed to live up to the ideals & beliefs & rights that our country was founded upon but they remain good & necessary ones#they're still fundamental to living in a free & equitable liberal democracy#the sins of our history & the current crisis we're in does not mean that our country is corrupt beyond saving#it means that we have to work to *make* those ideals & beliefs & rights equally accessible & true for *everyone*#it'll mean generations more difficult effort & setbacks but i do still truly believe it'll be worth it#because i want everyone living here now & in the future to live in that free & equitable democracy that we promise#because this is *my* country. and i love my country. and i want my country to love all its people too
There's something very sad and defeatist about the people who say, "No this IS who we are, the country is awful and--"
Yeah, yeah. It's bad. We get it. Kinda hard to miss right now. You know what? So is everywhere else. You are not going to find a single government, a single nation, anywhere on earth that is perfect and unproblematic.
We need to acknowledge this. Nowhere is perfect. Everywhere has corrupt people who actively seek positions they can use to exploit power and enrich themselves at the expense of others. The vast majority of countries in the world have a lot of blood on their hands and were founded in war; loads of countries have a history of colonization and exploitation of other countries, and a lot of that is continuing to this day.
Now raise your hand: who here was taught as a child to believe in the good your nation can do for its people and the world? Who here was raised with the idea that your country had an awful past but has learned better and is trying to move forward to do better and be better in the future?
Short of buying a boat and hiding away at sea, you are never, ever going to be free of nationality. Not even if you burn it all down; something new will just arise in its place. This is the world we have; this is the society we have to live in. Do you not wish it was better? Do you not wish that is did reflect that optimism you were raised with?
The reason children around the world are taught to believe in the good side of their nation is NOT because the people teaching us want to indoctrinate us into the cult of nationalism (okay yeah, some do do that on purpose, and sometimes that's just the result despite teachers' best efforts), but because they want us to see that good side, see what things are like now, and get angry and disappointed and energized enough to fight to make it reality. To actually do better and become a better world for everyone.
Throwing up your hands and declaring it beyond hope helps only the people who don't want you fighting to make things better. Making things better is not a problem that will be solved in any one person's lifetime. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second best time is now.
vincent price horror flicks are great because the wretched old servant will be like “beware, for the Evil Twisted Master approaches…. hark! i hear his wicked footstep on the stair even now!” and the door opens and it’s noted bisexual vincent price in a silly outfit
GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'."
A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face
