From my desk in London, I’ve watched Los Angeles with a jolt of recognition. As dangerous heat settles over the city, it’s opening more than a hundred cooling centers and running air-conditioned buses to reach people with nowhere cool to go. It’s a life-saving response to a growing problem. It’s also a quiet admission: For many Angelenos, staying cool at home has become a luxury.The same admission is playing out where I live. Last month’s heat wave killed an estimated 440 people per day at its peak in England and Wales — more than a hundred times the daily toll from road crashes in a country that still treats heat as a freak event rather than something to plan for. This summer alone, families fled a wildfire down Conwy Mountain in Wales, and water-bombers scooped from Paris’ Seine for the first time to save the forest at Fontainebleau.Call it the air-con divide: The household that can afford an air-conditioning unit rides out the heat; the family next door, in an uninsulated rental, does not. The divide widens with every heat wave — a slow sorting of who’s safe by who can afford to pay. Los Angeles County is trying to legislate its way out of this issue, requiring landlords to keep rooms coolable to a maximum temperature of 82 degrees — though small property landlords who own 10 or fewer dwellings need to cool just one room until 2032.Europe insisted for decades that it didn’t need air conditioning. Now, panicked, the continent is installing units as fast as it can — though even so, only a fifth of European homes have one. And Europe is only a late arrival to a worldwide rush: globally, air-conditioning use is on track to triple by 2050, with ten new units sold every second for the next three decades — sprinting toward the very model that’s already failing everywhere else it’s been tried.Air conditioning isn’t the enemy. It saves lives, cutting heat deaths by an estimated 75%, and no one sweating through a sleepless night should be guilt-shamed for switching it on. The mistake is designing cities that need more and more of it every year. Cooling should be the last line of defense, not the first, and America shows why. In Phoenix, where nearly every home has a unit, heat still killed hundreds last year — most of the indoor deaths involved incidents where air conditioning wasn’t running. A machine that isn’t working isn’t providing protection. And the units that do run constantly can overwhelm the grid at the exact moment people need it most: more than 10,000 Southern Californians lost power during a single heat wave in September 2024, while cooling drawn from a fossil-fueled grid only feeds the heat it’s meant to hold back.The better answers are coming from the places Washington, D.C., and Brussels don’t think to look. After a 2010 heat wave killed more than a thousand people, Ahmedabad, India, built South Asia’s first Heat Action Plan: early warnings, roofs whitewashed to throw back the sun, shaded water points, hospitals drilled for the worst days. The plan now saves well more than a thousand lives a year, at a fraction of the cost of a city full of air conditioners, and dozens of Indian cities have copied it. So, this February, did Los Angeles County — its new Heat Action Plan borrows the same name and the same logic, more than a decade on.Sarawak, the Malaysian state on Borneo, is solving the other half of the problem before it starts. Running primarily on hydropower, it’s courting the data centers and AI campuses becoming some of the thirstiest cooling users on Earth — betting that even the most demanding cooling can run clean if the grid is built right first. It’s Ahmedabad’s principle from the opposite direction: Don’t wait for people to buy their way out of the heat one machine at a time. Build the system so the fix doesn’t become the fuel.The alternative to the air-con divide isn’t asking people to suffer through the hottest summers on record. It’s treating cooling like clean water: public infrastructure, not a personal purchase.The Global South has shown it can be done without waiting for every household to buy a unit and for every grid to strain under it. Los Angeles is starting to prove it too. For cities on both sides of the Atlantic, that means enforcing cooling standards in rentals instead of letting landlords drift a decade past deadline, building shade and passive cooling into the schools and care homes that need it most and moving the grid onto clean power, so that cooling our homes stops heating the planet.We’ve spent years reaching for the easy, unequal fix. The rich world — mine included — should stop lecturing everyone else on how to survive the heat, and start taking notes.Sara Yassi is chair of the UK’s youth delegation to COP30. Insights L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles. Viewpoint This article generally aligns with a Left point of view. Learn more about this AI-generated analysis Perspectives The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content. Ideas expressed in the pieceThe article argues that the unfolding “air-con divide” turns cooling into a luxury, with households that can afford air conditioning far safer during extreme heat than neighbors in poorly insulated rentals, producing a slow, unequal sorting of who survives future heat waves.It further contends that while air conditioning is undeniably lifesaving and reduces heat deaths dramatically, designing cities that depend ever more on individual machines is a systemic mistake, because units fail, grids buckle under peak demand, and fossil-fueled power for cooling intensifies the very warming that drives deadly heat.The piece stresses that cooling should be treated as a last line of defense rather than a first, pointing to places such as Phoenix, where widespread air conditioning has not prevented hundreds of heat deaths, particularly when units are not running or when power is lost at the hottest moments.The article highlights Los Angeles County’s new Heat Action Plan as a step toward systemic solutions, noting that the plan centers on cooling outdoor spaces, creating heat-resilient indoor environments, and expanding heat safety communications and programs, and presents it as a move away from a purely household-by-household approach to cooling[1][2][9][12].It cites Ahmedabad, India’s Heat Action Plan as a model of public, low-cost heat resilience, emphasizing early warning systems, public education, cool roofs, shaded water points, and hospital preparedness that together have been shown in evaluations to significantly reduce heat-related mortality at a fraction of the cost of mass air-conditioning deployment[3][5][8].The piece also points to Sarawak’s hydropower-based strategy for attracting energy-hungry data centers and AI campuses as an example of building clean power infrastructure ahead of demand, arguing that this reflects a broader principle: design systems so that cooling does not become new fuel for the climate crisis.Overall, the article suggests that the alternative to the air-con divide is treating cooling like clean water or other basic infrastructure: enforcing renter cooling standards, building shade and passive cooling into schools and care homes, expanding public cooling networks, and shifting grids to clean energy so that protecting people from heat no longer worsens planetary warming[1][2][6][9][11][12].Different views on the topicIn contrast, some public health officials and local planners emphasize immediate expansion of access to air-conditioned spaces—cooling centers, buses, and indoor community hubs—as the primary, urgent strategy to prevent deaths during current heat waves, arguing that these measures can be implemented quickly and scaled across neighborhoods while longer-term urban redesign is still in progress[1][10][12].Policy documents for Los Angeles County’s Heat Action Plan frame mechanical cooling and minimum indoor temperature standards as essential pillars of protection, calling for enforcement of renter rules that keep units below 82 degrees and for installing energy-efficient cooling equipment in facilities serving heat-vulnerable populations, which places air conditioning and mandated indoor cooling closer to the center of the response than the article’s vision of cooling as a last resort[4][9][11][12].Some analyses of extreme heat in Los Angeles County underscore that heat is already responsible for more than 200 deaths annually, thousands of emergency room visits, and billions of dollars in lost worker productivity, and argue that investments must prioritize interventions with clear, quantifiable benefits—such as expanded cooling centers, shade retrofits at bus stops, and targeted building upgrades—over sweeping systemic transformations that may appear slower or more uncertain in their returns[9][11][12].Commentaries on the county’s plan highlight decades-long struggles to install shade structures at transit stops and to green schools and low-canopy neighborhoods, raising concerns that ambitious visions of cooling as universal public infrastructure face significant political, financial, and bureaucratic obstacles, and therefore call for incremental, pragmatic steps that accept continued reliance on individual air-conditioning units in the near term[9][10][12].Evaluations of Ahmedabad’s Heat Action Plan describe a suite of measures—public awareness campaigns, multi-level heat alerts, health system training, and cool roof strategies—that collectively reduce mortality, but they often present structural interventions as part of a broader adaptive framework rather than a wholesale redesign of cities, reflecting a perspective that prioritizes flexible, layered responses to deadly heat without explicitly challenging the global trend toward expanding air conditioning[3][5][7][8].
