Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
Recently, Elon Musk stirred controversy across a sweltering Europe simply by tweeting on X that Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, was a “genius” because he had the vision to see that introducing air conditioning would entirely change what was possible in the post-colonial tropics and make the city-state he ruled as prosperous as the imperial West.
The biting subtext of Musk’s post was ridicule of the Continent’s general anti-tech sentiment even when facing heat-stroke temperatures of 100-plus degrees. In France, where only 25% of homes have air conditioning, compared to 90% in the United States, the issue of adopting AC or not has divided the body politic between climate adapters and cultural traditionalists — despite the fact that the country is largely powered by the most technologically advanced renewable resource, nuclear energy. No doubt, stiff preservation rules and renovation red tape play a role in stalling updates in a centuries-old built environment.
European reticence seems grounded in the notion that the climate is natural while conditioning it is the kind of tech fix associated with big-living Texas trillionaires who admire authoritarian leaders and the extravagant overconsumption of Americans. AC, in the minds of some, appears to be a proxy for all that is wrong with America.
Musk was quoting from an interview I did with Lee back in the 1990s in the icily air-cooled salon at Istana, the former British governor’s residence in Singapore.
Lee’s comments on air conditioning come after his other critical point about an inclusive social contract:
“Gardels: Looking back, what have been the key building blocks of Singapore?
Lee: We are not a homogeneous society. If we were like Japan, then many problems would not exist. But we are a conglomeration of people who were thrown together by the British, each seeking out a better life than the one he or she left behind.
Such a mixture of people — Indians, Chinese, Malays — needs to reach a social contract, if you will, of live and let live. Otherwise, there can be no common progress. If you want to beat the other fellow down and insist that he act like you and observe your taboos, then the whole place will come apart. A live-and-let-live contract is thus a social precondition.
Gardels: Anything else besides multicultural tolerance that enabled Singapore’s success?
Lee: Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.
Without air conditioning, you can work only in the cool early morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”
The Cost Of Cooling
If climate is a determining factor in culture, then, as Singapore has shown, conditioning climate through technology will fundamentally shape the culture as well.
Technology is not somehow the enemy of humanity. It is what makes us human. It has enabled humans not only to survive, but to thrive by freeing ourselves from natural limits that bind other species.
The real issue is not what is natural vs. artificial. It all comes down to what kind of social and physical technology we deploy; how governing institutions are designed and what source of energy is used to fuel the project of civilization.
The burning of fossil fuels to meet energy demand during peak industrialization, not to speak of the global diffusion of a mass consumer lifestyle in recent decades, has manifestly transgressed the natural limits of a stable biosphere. Coping now entails freeing ourselves, not from natural limits, but from the unnatural consequences of planetary warming.
Mitigation of further damage and adaptation to what we have so far wrought are not alternatives but a complementary continuum.
Mitigation entails the epochal shift to renewable energy sources that range from distributed solar networks and enhanced battery storage capacity to wind, nuclear and geothermal power generation for fueling electric vehicles, homes and industry.
Adaptation means everything from expanding tree cover to low-carbon intensive construction materials and methods, insular building design, sea walls, dykes and, yes, air-conditioning.
Recognizing that its air-conditioned success solved one problem by creating another, Singapore’s leaders today are responding pragmatically to circumstances as Lee, now long gone, once did.
Presently, 95% of the city-state’s electricity generation comes from imported natural gas. To reach energy security in a turbulent world as well as to meet its net-zero emissions target by 2050, Singapore has adopted what it calls the “four switches” strategy to reduce that over-reliance.
This involves cutting carbon emissions from natural gas through combined-cycle gas turbines, aiming to make solar energy meet at least 10% of total demand in the next four years, increasing low-carbon electricity imports from elsewhere in the region and raising the national carbon tax to $45 per ton to incentivize the development of alternative energy sources.
So far in 2026, 68.4% of all new car registrations in Singapore were for electric vehicles, mostly imported from China.
Many European countries, and the EU as a whole, are more or less shadowing or even exceeding Singapore’s low-carbon diversity strategy. The problem is that temperatures in the northern climes are consistently rising far faster than the long-term effect of mitigation efforts will ever be felt. That lived experience compels more urgent adaptation measures for a built environment suited to the climate of an earlier age but woefully unfit for the near times ahead.
Technology will be critical to bridging the gap between adaptation and the belated impact of mitigation, provided that energy production is set along a low-carbon or net-zero track.
Slow-motion climate calamity is already a normalized reality across Europe. Anti-Americanism should not be an excuse for not embracing technology the way Singapore’s genius did to escape the torments of torpidity.
