Europe Is Cooking

Adaptation theater

Everything Europe tries instead of air conditioning.

A heatwave arrives and the continent springs into action: shutters, fans, water, a nap, a freshly painted roof, a list of public buildings you are told to walk to. Anything, anything, except the one machine that actually keeps a person alive at 40°C.

AC is not a crime.

We mustn’t do it everywhere, otherwise we run the risk of warming up the country, and so it’s a bad solution.

Agnes Pannier-Runacher, French Minister for Ecological Transition, on air conditioning, during the July 2025 heatwave. The Local France, 2025
But Europe loves heat pumps →

The list

The cope, ranked.

Each one is real, each one is public policy, and none of them is air conditioning.

  1. Send the children home

    When the classroom passes 30°C, Europe’s fix is no classroom. France shut roughly 1,350 schools in the June 2025 heatwave. And 6% of Italian schools have air conditioning. Six. Reuters / AFP, 2025

  2. Open a "cooling center"

    The official plan when your home bakes: leave it. Barcelona now runs 500+ "climate shelters", and brags that 99.2% of residents live within a 10-minute walk of one. A city-wide confession that the homes do not work. Barcelona City Council, 2026

  3. Go stand in a supermarket

    French health advice for a heatwave: spend "2 to 3 hours a day in a cool place: a cinema, a library, a supermarket, a museum." Translation: go enjoy someone else’s air conditioning. Just do not put one in your bedroom. Santé publique France, 2025

  4. Plug in a fan

    The UK government says use a fan only below 35°C. Above that, peer-reviewed work finds it does nothing for an older body. It moves the hot air around the room, slightly faster, and Europe calls that a heat plan. GOV.UK / Lancet Planetary Health, 2024

  5. Close the shutters, drink water

    Doctor’s orders for 40°C: shut the blinds before dawn, sip 1.5 to 2 litres, hide from the sun. Sensible. Also exactly what people did in 1822. None of it cools the room a frail person is lying in tonight. Santé publique France, 2025

  6. Ban work (the siesta, by decree)

    In the 2025 heatwave more than a dozen Italian regions banned outdoor work from 12:30 to 16:00. The economy clocks off at lunchtime because the buildings cannot stay open. Cooling them was apparently not on the table. Il Sole 24 Ore, 2025

  7. Paint the roof white

    Modeling says white roofs could shave 1.2 to 2°C off London’s outdoor air. A genuinely nice gesture. Your grandmother is still indoors at 39°C, waiting for the paint to save her. UCL, 2024

To be fair: no health body bans air conditioning. The WHO endorses it, "rationally and moderately," for the vulnerable. The point is that Europe treats cooling as a guilty last resort instead of the default. WHO Europe, 2021

The answer was never complicated.

One device cools the room a sick person sleeps in. It sits in ~90% of US homes and ~19% of Europe’s. Everything on this page is what a rich continent does to avoid saying its name: air conditioning.

Now see the public spaces → Richer than Korea, a fifth of the AC → How we count