Here’s a trivia question for you: Which part of the world suffers the most heat deaths per person? Not the Sahara or the Persian Gulf—it is Europe, a continent not known for being close to the equator. In the summer of 2022 alone, more than 61,000 Europeans died from the heat, and another record heat wave is underway today. (This yearly death toll exceeds the number of people killed annually by firearms in the U.S.)
How does the continent with some of the fewest hot days on Earth lead the world in dying from them? Two letters that Brussels bureaucrats detest: A/C. Roughly one in five European homes has air conditioning, compared to about ninety percent in the United States and Japan. The economist Alan Barreca found that the spread of home cooling explains essentially the entire collapse in American heat deaths over the twentieth century. The technology works. Too many European leaders have decided not to use it.
The reason is theological. The old left dreamed of comfort for the masses; today’s green-tinged version treats energy as a sin to atone for, with cooling recast as a decadent Yankee indulgence. Consider the debate in France during the current heat wave. When Marine Le Pen’s right-wing party proposed a “massive air-conditioning plan” as basic public health, the leftist political leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon warned it would only “increase the damage” and confided that he won’t put his great-granddaughter anywhere air-conditioned because it “destroys your sinuses.” He was explicit: “We must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere.” Ecology Minister Barbut declared herself “horrified” by people who want cooling everywhere—and presented a bizarre non sequitur: would it, she demanded, prevent a single forest fire? No, Minister. Neither does a fire extinguisher prevent earthquakes.
Germany, which lectures the continent on carbon while burning brown coal after shutting down its nuclear plants presents an irony: a frugal German sweating through a heat wave on a coal-heavy grid can be responsible for more carbon than a Frenchman lounging in an air-conditioned villa on nuclear power. The German has both the discomfort and the worse “carbon footprint.” As the Flemish philosopher Maarten Boudry writes in the Dutch daily de Volkskrant, “grid management works better than self-flagellation.”
And the inconsistency is telling. Governments that spent fortunes on public health and shielding the elderly from a virus, now tell hospital inpatients to draw the curtains and ride out 40°C weather like it’s 1955. Nobody caps the winter thermostat at 15°C or calls central heating a decadent luxury. Heat that kills in summer is no more sacred than cold that kills in winter. What good is trying to prevent climate change while refusing to protect people from the climate?
Europe has the economic strength to save lives and increase comfort and productivity. Will it give itself permission to do so?