Why Everyone Needs To Chill Out About Mamdani's AC Request
78 degrees is not a ‘sauna.’
We’re all unfortunately familiar by now with the Great AC Scandal of 2026. New York is experiencing a heat wave that makes the city feel even more like a pizza oven than usual this summer. The “feel like” temperature (the one that matters most unless you’re an amateur climatologist) hit 112 over the holiday weekend. Yet, last Wednesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani chilled America to its bones with the following communist decree:
“New York: it’s hot out there, and the power grid is working overtime to keep us cool. Set your AC to 78 degrees, turn off lights/electronics you’re not using, and unplug what you can. Our City is doing its part too: maintaining the 78 degrees rule in our buildings, dimming/turning off our lights during peak electricity demand, asking private partners to do the same, and powering down non-essential equipment. A stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved. Let’s ease demand — and get through the heat — together.”
This almost immediately sparked a 2020 covid-era right-wing resistance, because a disturbing number of Americans suffer from oppositional defiance disorder. There was a clearly coordinated response from Republicans for whom shame and honesty aren’t in their job descriptions. Sen. Lindsey Graham warned, “This is the future that WOKE Democrats want not just for NYC but for South Carolina too!” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis snarkily said, “Is this what was meant by the warmth of collectivism?” Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley wrote, “Welcome to socialism!”
If you’re someone who mainlines Fox News, it obviously doesn’t matter that Mamdani’s suggestion was consistent with past guidance from Republican and Democratic mayors and governors — including Nikki Haley herself. The same recommendation was even on the Department of Energy’s official web page before vanishing in a flash of gaslight.
(BTW: Any thermostat debate reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Curb Your Enthusiasm.)
All this contrived furor over Mamdani’s banal message conveniently ignores that 78 degrees is a perfectly comfortable temperature. It’s like the summer high in San Diego, where there’s still a debate over whether air conditioning is necessary. Many San Diego homes were historically built without AC because of the mild climate. Global warming has increased that need over the years but that’s because summer highs are now inching into the mid 80s and low 90s. A similar situation has occurred in the Pacific Northwest, as summers in Portland and Seattle have gotten more oppressively hot. When I was in England recently, it was scorching and unlike my native South, the buildings there aren’t designed to maximize coolness.
Republican Rep. Brandon Gill posted on social media, “Welcome to socialism, where the government demands you turn your house into a sauna because they can't plan for the super unpredictable fact that it tends to get hot in the summer.”
Gill represents Texas’s 26th congressional district, so he should be accustomed enough to hot weather that he wouldn’t describe 78 degrees as sauna-like. (The average sauna temperature ranges from 150 to 195 degrees. Maybe Gill’s home sauna is broken.) A heated pool is usually 78 degrees at a minimum and is meant to be refreshing on a hot day. Daniel Di Martino from the Manhattan Institute posted a video where he defiantly set his thermostat to 67 degrees, which is sweater weather. If I had ever dared set a thermostat below 75 — 72 if the Queen or Oprah were visiting — my mother would have unleashed hell, where it is hotter than a sauna.
My first New York apartment didn’t have air conditioning, so I relied on a fan and an open window that let in stagnant air. This was the mid-1990s and New York has gotten steadily warmer. (This is year round, so New York winters are now snowier.) In my AC-less 20s, I would’ve found 78 degrees perfect for a summer afternoon drinking ice tea with all the windows covered from the sun.
I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and my experience with air conditioning is that it’s expensive, so no one kept their homes like a meat locker. That was a luxury reserved for the shopping mall or movie theater, where come to think of it white people probably controlled the thermostats. Meanwhile, Black folks had to bring a sweater when shopping or seeing a movie in the summer. My elder relatives insisted that if you kept the AC too cold, it could cause or aggravate arthritis. (There is perhaps some partial truth to this.)
When I started working in New York, it often felt as if men like Daniel Di Martino set the workplace thermostat. I recall a 2015 headline from the satirical web site Reductress read: Archaeologists Discover Perfectly Preserved Frozen Woman Under Office A/C Vent. This is more than just a joke. It was a disturbing reality.
At my last New York City job, it would often get so cold in the office that my former colleague Kelso used to wear Bob Cratchit gloves while typing. This was in the summer! That was both uncomfortable but absurdly inefficient. Air conditioning should ideally make you feel less hot, not freezing cold. One could argue that 78 degrees is the true Goldilocks setting. After all, if New Yorkers followed Mamdani’s commie decree (which was more a polite request), the temperature in their homes would still be almost 30 degrees cooler than it currently is outside. That’s an engineering marvel for which we should be grateful, but instead Republicans are complaining and encouraging people to drive up their power bill at a time when the economy is hardly humming. That’s just not cool.
78 degrees is fine, but we all know it’s not about the temperature.
The republicans are only complaining about the 78 F setting because it came from Mamdani!
Hypocrite all!