Turn off the AC! Europe has decided to die of heat for the sake of ideology

In Versailles, this month, a group of students took their exams in an underground parking garage: it was the only cool place in the building. At other French schools, classes were held in the hallways to escape the sweltering heat of the classrooms, and stories of children fainting in 104-degree heat went viral. More than 1,300 schools closed in a single week because it was impossible to breathe inside. At a hospital in Paris (a typical case, not an exception), only three of its 30 rooms have air conditioning, and temperatures in the others soared to 95 F with patients inside.

All of this is happening in 2026, on one of the richest continents on the planet, in the face of a problem that humanity solved once and for all in 1902, when engineer Willis Carrier developed the first modern air conditioning system. And yet, the major political debate of recent weeks has not been about how quickly to equip schools and hospitals with cooling systems, but rather something far more absurd: whether it is morally right to turn them on.

The absurdity we are witnessing can be summed up in a single sentence: a civilization that can cool everything chooses not to do so, and punishes its children, exposes its sick and buries its elderly every summer, so as not to disrespect a dogma. The European Commission itself released a document this year calling for cooling to become “the next social right” in Europe and which, two paragraphs later, clarifies that air conditioning on its own is not going to save us. Of course, no one is saying that it is politics and its green obsessions that turned cooling into a luxury good. In Europe, energy prices are much higher than in the United States and much of Latin America.

What alternative do European authorities offer? Lower the blinds, use fans, paint the roofs white and plant more trees. In other words, exactly what a Lombard peasant was doing in 1450, but with a PDF from the Directorate-General for Energy. In Great Britain, things go even further: there are municipalities that require residents to remove the air conditioners they had already installed.

There is no better symbol of this philosophy than the image released by the European Commission itself last week. In the midst of a heat wave, “the air conditioning went out” on floors 1 through 7 of the Berlaymont building in Brussels, Belgium, where the three thousand rank-and-file employees are sweating it out. Ursula von der Leyen works on the 13th floor; the commissioners, from the eighth floor up. There, the air conditioning continued to run, of course. Following the barrage of criticism, the commission claims it was a “technical glitch.” What is indisputable is the result: rank-and-file staff were left without cooling while the political leadership was not. The official recommendation for coping with the heat wave included avoiding going outside at midday, drinking water and “turning off heat sources in the office”—that is, the computers. The rebuke of von der Leyen went viral around the world. The class that dictates energy efficiency directives for 450 million people is, literally, cooler than its subjects.

What is truly remarkable is how, in this moral climate, keeping a grandmother alive has become a right-wing position. When Marine Le Pen declared that “air conditioning saves lives” and called it absurd that most French schools and hospitals lack it, the left did not respond with a better plan—it responded with derision. The Socialist Party dismissed the proposal as a farce; Jean-Luc Mélenchon argued that installing air conditioning everywhere only makes matters worse. Translation: since not everyone can have air conditioning, the “elegant” solution is for almost no one to have it. It is the old trick of leveling down (except for the bureaucratic elite)—so reminiscent of "Animal Farm" that it’s overwhelming.

And the numbers, when you really look at them, are where the nonsense goes from funny to macabre. The landmark study by Barreca and colleagues tracked the same U.S. states before and after the advent of air conditioning: the widespread adoption of the technology reduced the risk of dying on a day of extreme heat by nearly 75% throughout the 20th century. It wasn’t hospitals or public health campaigns: it was the cooling device. Air conditioning's incidence in European households hovers around 19%, compared to 76% in North America and more than 90% in Japan.

Based on this, Roger Pielke Jr. calculated the counterfactual scenario in a damning report for the AEI: if Europe had had U.S.-level coverage in the summer of 2022, some 26,000 deaths would have been prevented; with nearly universal coverage, about 35,000; and even a modest coverage rate of 40% would save between 6,000 and 8,000 lives per year. The backdrop is a recurring tragedy: the summer of 2022 left some 68,000 heat-related deaths on the continent, and 2024 saw around 62,800, while the 2003 heat wave had already killed more than 15,000 people in France alone. The E.U. itself acknowledges, in the text on “social rights,” between 46,400 and 60,000 deaths in 2022, 89% of whom were over 65.

The gamble seems, to put it bluntly, Darwinian. Because European heat doesn't kill everyone equally: it kills the elderly. The danger of heat is a problem felt more acutely in Europe, which has the oldest population of all continents. Those over 80 account for about two-thirds of deaths; those over 65, around 93%.

It wouldn’t be necessary to air-condition every office on the continent to curb this: it would be enough to equip nursing homes, hospitals and senior care facilities to capture nearly all the benefit. The statistic that should put half the world’s leadership to shame is the distribution: the countries whose leaders preach energy conservation the most are the ones with the highest number of preventable deaths. Germany has 3% of households with air conditioning; the United Kingdom, 5%; France, 25%. The rich, cold and morally impeccable North is responsible for more deaths than the Mediterranean—not fewer.

Here we see the metaphor that governs everything else: this is Europe dying over something that happened in the Stone Age. Heat is humanity’s oldest problem, and we were managing it with caves, "siestas" and cool mud long before we invented the wheel. It’s worth adding a fact that the mainstream narrative prefers to ignore: in Europe, the cold still kills far more people than the heat, so the panic is focused, on top of everything else, on the less lethal half of the thermometer. Behind it all lies the ideology of "energy degrowth," which treats every kilowatt-hour as a sin rather than a tool to keep people from dying; the result is a continent that prefers a clean corpse to a dirty compressor.

The extent to which environmentalist discourse has taken root in France is hard to believe. A survey by OpinionWay, conducted on a representative sample of the French population, found that 58% of the French would rather suffer the heat than install an air conditioner, in order to protect the environment. The same study also reveals that nearly half (49%) feel guilty when using air conditioning, and 48% even believe that air conditioners should be banned due to their environmental impact.

Europe is committing “heat suicide,” not because of its geography—since it has fewer hot days than almost any other inhabited region—but because of ideology. The level of irony bordered on the ridiculous when, during London Climate Action Week, a conference dedicated to discussing how to adapt to the heat had to be canceled because it was too hot. The event, organized at the London School of Economics, was suspended after a red alert made it unsafe to use a building without air conditioning.

While Europe deliberates, the world watches and laughs. The Chinese state media covered the embarrassment of Von der Leyen's advice with undisguised enthusiasm: The Global Times presented it as proof of the superiority of its governance model, and Xinhua amplified it, and the subtext was clear: the country is providing cooling for 1.4 billion people while the superpower lecturing it can’t even keep its own officials cool. It’s not just rhetoric. Midea, Gree and Haier are churning out portable air conditioners nonstop. China isn’t preaching: it produces and sells the machines at will. 

The finishing touch came from Audrey Pulvar, deputy mayor of Paris, who, instead of buying equipment, went out to respond to American tourists who were mocking the city for not having air conditioning. His argument, paraphrased but not exaggerated: you Americans, with your cities that are “90% air-conditioned,” caused this heat, so stop lecturing us. Yes, he was indeed blaming the United States instead of blaming his own ineptitude and fanaticism. It’s the perfect circle of reasoning: air conditioning caused the heat that’s killing you, therefore dying without air conditioning is your contribution to the planet. This line of reasoning encapsulates the entire problem.

Because that’s what it’s really about, deep down. Europe isn’t being killed by the climate: it’s being killed by its own dogma. A continent that survived the Black Death, two world wars and the Little Ice Age is being brought to its knees by the month of June—not because of a lack of technology or money (the economic losses caused by the heat wave itself run into the hundreds of billions), but because pressing a button has become heresy. The suicide is not thermal; it is liturgical. And like any good martyr, Europe is going to die convinced that its sacrifice saves the world, with the small detail that the world, this time, already has the air conditioning on and is watching it sweat.