Even while trapped in Europe’s deadly summer sweatbox, two guilt-ridden New York Times reporters fretted about the modern-day life-saver of air-conditioning, issuing a snotty, dismissive story, “Europe’s Deadly Heat Wave: A Jolt for Climate Action, or Just for A.C.?” Even the byline had a touch of heatstroke by Times standards: “Michael D. Shear reported from London. Jeanna Smialek from Brussels. Both places were very hot.”
The story nudged the sweating Euro-populace to keep favoring hypothetical reductions in average global temperatures over decades, against the urgent deadly problem of the summer heat wave, misery exacerbated by Europe's stubborn refusal to embrace the modern-era of air conditioning (perhaps not wanting to be like those soft spoiled energy-wasting Americans).
Of course, left-wing European politicians ideologically opposed to air conditioning don’t have to swelter like the commoners several floors below them.
Shear likely came up with the opening dig at Britain’s conservative leader.
It was a crisp 54 degrees in Aberdeen, on the northeast coast of Scotland, last week when Kemi Badenoch, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, once again championed the country’s fossil fuel industry.
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Eight days later, thermostats across southern England and Wales recorded soaring heat, with temperatures in London nearing 100 degrees. Schools closed, trains were canceled or delayed and some hospitals halted elective procedures….
For politicians like Ms. Badenoch, whose party won a special election in Aberdeen, the increasingly intense heat presents a challenge. How do they reconcile their support for faster extraction and use of polluting energy sources that contribute to the warming of the planet, with the reality of a planet that already feels like it’s burning up?
Meanwhile, Europeans are suffering and dying now.
A spokesman for Ms. Badenoch, who has called herself a “net zero skeptic,” did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in an interview this week with the right wing broadcaster GB News, Ms. Badenoch said that while it was “important that we do what we can to tackle climate change,” the country’s climate approaches are not “actually sorting anything out. All they have done is send jobs and emissions to other countries.”
Shear and Smialek blew more hot air, as if the desire to live at a bearable temperature was a right-wing plot.
Increasingly, the answer from right-wing politicians is to focus on a short-term fix that almost everyone agrees is necessary — the installation of air-conditioning units in European homes, schools, public buildings and hospitals.
During intense heat waves, calling for improvement of the sometimes crumbling infrastructure of aging European cities can be an effective way of drawing attention to that problem without saying much about the longer-term, underlying cause: rising greenhouse gas emissions.
In France, far-right politicians who have advocated cutting net zero initiatives hope to gain from the heat wave, using it to accuse the government of failing to make the country more resilient, but also as a cultural issue against the hard left, which has often opposed the use of air-conditioning on environmental grounds.
The article had one cool blast of common sense:
In the Belgian city of Ghent, which is run mostly by left-of-center politicians, the municipal website this week discouraged citizens from using air-conditioners, saying that “the best air-conditioner is a tree” and advising they use fans and request a free tree to plant outside their houses.
Maurits Vande Reyde, a right-wing member of the Flemish Parliament, responded to Ghent’s recommendations on social media.
“It is absurd that all governments in our country, under pressure from left-green mumbo-jumbo, advise against the use of air-conditioning,” he wrote on Tuesday. “The most efficient and best solution. How many deaths would the government already have on its conscience with this kind of absurd advice?”
This was intended to be the cherry-on-top conclusion:
In London this week, environmentalists were hoping that the intense weather would underscore their arguments.
“There is irony in the fact that a London Climate Action Week event had to be canceled due to extreme heat in a temperate, wealthy country,” said Chris Anderson, head of climate risk and resilience at Practical Action, an environmental group.
Snowstorms have canceled global warming conferences in the past, to conservative amusement -- but the Times doesn't use those opportunities to take shots at environmental hysterics.
