According to MIT heating systems contribute significantly more to greenhouse gas emissions than air conditioning. Why don’t Parisians give up artificial heat in the winter if they care so much about climate?https://t.co/DArob7Yeux https://t.co/0Dx4J54TfP
— Marc Thiessen (@marcthiessen) June 29, 2026
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/does-heating-or-cooling-our-buildings-contribute-more-climate-change
December 18, 2024
Globally, heating creates much more climate pollution than air conditioning, and that’s often true at the level of a single building too.
Humans are a Goldilocks species. There is a small band of temperatures where we feel comfortable, which is why societies spend tremendous amounts of energy heating or cooling our homes and other buildings. We also generate lots of climate pollution in the process: over 5 billion tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) a year, or close to 15% of all the CO2 emissions from humanity’s energy use.1
Most of those emissions come from heating. According to the most recent figures from the International Energy Agency, for every one ton of CO2 our cooling equipment emits, heating technologies contribute another four. But, says Christoph Reinhart, MIT professor and director of the building technology program, that is poised to change as the Earth heats up.
“We heat more right now, but there are various trends that explain why this is going to change,” he says. “It’s very likely that we are going to cool more in the not distant future.”
From a pure physics standpoint, heating a space is simpler than cooling it, Reinhart says. Even on a cold day, the sun is out and creates some heat. Our own bodies generate heat, as do our computers and appliances (including the ones whose purpose is to cool, like air conditioners and refrigerators). Fire is as old as civilization, and humans have spent centuries burning climate-warming fossil fuels like coal and oil for heat.
But air conditioning, which made active cooling of our homes and offices possible, was only invented in the early 20th century. “This process is still really magical,” Reinhart says. “There’s nothing in nature that you can turn on and suddenly it becomes ice cold on a hot day, right? Because it works against entropy. So it’s just really fascinating that we can do this at all.”
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Historically, then, heating has contributed more to climate change than cooling has, simply because heating was more available. And some research suggests that heating an individual building or home takes more energy than cooling one.
