In France, you have to get permission from both the government and your neighbors to put in air conditioning. You will also want to be wealthy because it is more profitable to sell it to the rest of Europe than domestically.(2) America has far more equity, about 90% of people have air conditioning but the new AC Map shows that not all of it is optimal. Portable units in a humid area are not very effective, for example.
If you're going to spend the money on electricity, and can afford any new installation costs, a new Air Conditioning Dataset, created using "AI" (an LLM), known data samples of types compiled by the American Housing Survey and the Energy Information Administration, and some guesstimation may help you determine what will be best. Along the way, they invoke climate change, which you basically have to invoke to get published in 2025, it seems, but heat waves happened long before the Chinese dictatorship created 75% of the world's greenhouse gases and rationing and mitigation by the United States won't help.
Importantly, it can help American protect the poor and elderly that the French ignore.(3)
They highlighted some features that probably were not a surprise to residents in various locations. Central and evaporative coolers are common in rural Oregon while wealthier people in Portland have more centralized air conditioning and poor people have nothing at all. Or that in Florida, where cities are also more progressive and therefore rich, over 95 percent of urban homes have central air conditioning.
Wealthy elites telling the poor to worry about emissions once the rich have air conditioning is not equitable and it's not ethical, but it is common. California has expensive solar installations on homes in Malibu running their central air units and those are subsidized by poor people in Compton who don't even have air conditioners but are forced to pay 100 percent more for light than they paid in 2016.
Some of the demographics are interesting. In the southwest, Latinos are far more likely to have evaporative coolers while New York City residents have so many wealthy people and then so many poor people Manhattan and the Bronx could be separate cities entirely to outside air analysts.
Citation: Ahn, Y., Uejio, C.K. A Comprehensive Dataset of Residential Air Conditioning Prevalence in the Continental United States. Sci Data 12, 1717 (2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-06104-3
NOTES:
(1) California chooses to pay more, they mandate and subsidize solar and control utility rates, which is why the cost of electricity has gone up over 100% in the last 10 years, but the rest of the country can make sure their citizens are prepared affordably.
(2) That is why more poor and elderly die during heat waves there than will happen in the United States with guns during an entire year - including criminals killed and suicides.
(3) In 2003, French media famously showed crowds of young people in Paris protesting against American involvement in Iraq, even though French intelligence told the CIA that Iraq was capable of building weapons of mass destruction, while media ignored the 14,000 people who died in the heat - to the relief of President Chirac, who saved money he was paying the retirees and he could claim his disastrous dirigisme and deportation of Jews was saving the country.
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