Does the UK need air conditioning?

We do not all need air conditioning, however.In London and the southeast, there are a lot of homes that over time are going to need some form of active cooling.What that means is more than we have now.So it doesn't have to mean air conditioning unit of the sort that you can go buy down at your local big box store.There are lots of different ways to provide active cooling.And there are also very cool ways and very sustainable ways to create that.

We could go into all kinds of cool technologies.What's a sustainable way to cool your house?

Well, so for example, Beds Ed, a development in South London, has these chimneys that will draw cool air up through the house so that you can actually create essentially active ventilation, but it's just propelled through the wind that goes past above the roofs.So it's not like you're plugging that in.You don't have to plug anything in.There's no need for energy generated by renewables or otherwise.So it's a smart solution that allows then for sort of more ventilation.And that can also be combined with my favorite piece of cooling technology.

a rock store, which is where you have a load of rocks in a basement in a labyrinth.It's particularly useful for public buildings.And basically, you pass the air over these cool rocks that are a little bit like the whiskey stones that you might put in your drink that don't dilute the whiskey.And they cool the air.And then that cool air is drawn through the building.And so it's creating, essentially, a kind of air conditioning.

But again, nothing is plugged in.So I'm just saying, there's cool ways to do this.But it is true that, especially in London and the southeast, and especially in buildings that are, for example, a single aspect, you can't get a through -draft, and buildings that might not be close to any sort of trees, other kind of green spaces and so on, where there will be some form of active cooling that is needed.And I just want to reiterate what I said at the beginning.We need to not panic and all have individual solutions.We need to work together for systemic solutions.