From ‘heat panic’ to ‘sacrificed at the altar’: Europe’s air conditioning culture wars heat up

As the afternoon heat rose to a dizzying 41.7C (107F) in eastern Brandenburg on Sunday, taking German temperatures to unprecedented highs, Mario, 65, took precautions but did not panic. Two years ago, a fierce heatwave had prompted him to buy a powerful device that few Germans own: an air conditioning unit.

“The summers are slowly getting warmer,” says the retired handyman in Neuzelle on the German-Polish border, whose bungalow is now among the 6% of German homes with fixed air-conditioning. “And as you get older, the heat gets harder to endure.”

Europe is reeling from its worst heatwave on record, and as it braces for the next bout of scorching weather, its lack of air conditioning has been criticised more than any other solution that governments have been slow to promote. The emerging culture war has frustrated health experts who want more air conditioning for vulnerable groups but are wary of widespread adoption in private homes.

“Much of Europe’s investment has rightly gone into longer-term solutions like shade, insulation and cooling centres, rather than mechanical cooling,” says Hans Kluge, the head of the World Health Organization’s Europe office, which recommends nuanced adoption of air conditioning that protects those at high risk. “Both have a role.”

Efforts to adapt have brought death tolls down by 75% for the kind of heat that was considered extreme two decades ago, studies suggest, but heatwaves have in that time grown even hotter. More than 200,000 people died from heat in Europe in the last four years, according to WHO estimates, and calls for faster change are mounting. The record-breaking June heat is likely to yield a death toll in the thousands, if not low tens of thousands – well above the levels that trouble countries such as the US, which is also facing a historic heatwave but uses air conditioning to cool 90% of homes.

Expert advice to install air conditioning in the places where people need it most – hospitals, care homes, schools, and public transport – enjoys support from across the political spectrum. But in recent days, accusations that mainstream parties are blocking air conditioning to save the environment have come to dominate the debate.

The day after Germany’s heat record was broken, Marc Bernhard, the construction spokesperson for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), said his party would stop people being “sacrificed on the altar” of mainstream climate ideology, such as energy efficiency ratings. “Climate hysteria is leading to more heat-related deaths due to ideological construction errors such as abstaining from air conditioning.”

This was a sharp move away from the party’s views just one year ago – when its health spokesperson, Martin Sichert, played down death tolls in a dismissal of the government’s “heat panic”. It also stands in sharp contrast to AfD’s vehement rejection of heat pumps, which became an unlikely enemy of the political right three years ago.

In France, meanwhile, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which has fought renovations to make buildings energy-efficient and sought to block wind turbines and solar panels, has made air conditioning a core focus while attacking policies to stop the planet from heating.

The tense debate within Europe has been inflamed by commentators in the US who hold up Europe’s lack of AC as evidence of a poor, misguided and overregulated continent. “Europeans should just install air conditioning,” reads part of a chatbot-generated text on X that was boosted by Elon Musk and has been viewed nearly 20m times. “The American approach to summer was correct all along.”

Air conditioning is the norm in rich countries from the US to Japan to Australia, but only about 15% of the 3.5 billion people living in regions with high temperatures own one. As temperatures and incomes rise, global cooling demand is set to soar. In south-east Asia, the International Energy Agency expects the number of air conditioners to rise ninefold between 2020 and 2040 under current policies.

Experts say there are downsides to air conditioning. Expelling hot air into surrounding streets can worsen the urban heat island effect, and the energy use heightens the risk of blackouts. But its climate impact in Europe is small and set to shrink further, with the continent burning fossil fuels for less than 30% of its electricity and more than a dozen countries planning to fully phase them out of power grids within a decade.

Meanwhile, although planning laws in some places have made it hard to install air conditioning in private households, there is little evidence to suggest red tape or climate concerns are the driving forces behind low rates of adoption across Europe.

In fact as carbon emissions have heated the continent twice as fast as the global average, the extra heat has increasingly prompted people in the warmest regions of Europe to mechanically cool their homes. The share of households in Italy and Spain with air conditioning has quickly grown to more than half; while in France it has risen to 24%, with up to 48% in hot southern provinces and as little as 10% in cool northern ones.

In Germany, which has some of the lowest air conditioning uptake in Europe, in part due to a high proportion of renters, some homeowners feel even June’s record-breaking heat was not disruptive enough to justify the purchase. “We’d consider getting air conditioning if the summers keep getting hotter, but when it’s just a few days we can bear it,” says Gabriele Werner, who works in the tourist information office of Neuzelle, near where the weekend heat was at its worst.

When the Guardian visited Neuzelle and the neighbouring district of Neißemünde, where almost every second voter backed the AfD at the last election, the most common response to the weekend’s searing heat was apathy, along with pockets of outright denial.

“Climate change is just a word that gets trumpeted,” says Reinhard Lange, a retired electrician whose 150-year-old house sits down the road from the weather station in Coschen that provisionally broke Germany’s national heat record on Sunday. “Back when I was a child, it was also warm. It just wasn’t played up.”

Kluge says Europe’s strong emergency response during the recent heat saved lives – with red alerts, school closures and fast opening of cooling centres – but more work could be done to ensure regular contact with isolated older people, who account for most of the death toll. “The priority now is ensuring AC reaches people for whom it’s a medical necessity, while continuing to build out the infrastructure – trees, green roofs, cooler buildings – that protects everyone, including people who simply can’t fit a unit in their home.”

Other experts have gone further, voicing support for air conditioning in social housing on account of growing inequality between those with cooling and those without, as well as the rise of societally harmful drains on energy.

“We are currently focusing a lot of our energy and water resources during heatwaves on cooling data centres,” says Dr Chloe Brimicombe, a climate scientist at Oxford University who researches extreme heat. “Lives are more valuable to us than AI – or at least they should be, right?”