Europe Faces Heat Wave Amidst Climate Debate and Shifting Energy Policies

Among those attending the conference were Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K.’s populist right-wing party, Reform U.K., and Steve Koonin, who was handpicked by Wright to co-author a U.S. government report that misrepresented mainstream climate science. House Speaker Mike Johnson also delivered video remarks to an audience that included Boris Johnson, the former prime minister of Britain, and Bill Anderson, the CEO of Bayer. (Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, the owner of POLITICO, also spoke at the conference.)

It’s not the first time Wright has described cold temperatures as a greater danger than heat. Insufficient heating is a wintertime killer — in Europe deaths from cold currently outnumber those from heat by a ratio of 8 to 1. But heat is an acute — and growing — threat to populations as climate change intensifies and prolongs deadly heat waves, killing tens of thousands of people across Europe in the last decade. In the U.S., heat is the biggest weather-related killer, surpassing cold.

Wright’s comments came as June temperatures soared to new heights in London and other parts of Europe, a region that is warming twice as fast as the global average and lacks widespread air conditioning.

The heat wave has forced schools to shutter, disrupted travel and strained power supplies. Several events around London Climate Action Week, the city’s premier climate event, were cancelled due to sweltering conditions, including an event about how to address extreme heat. Around 40 people have drowned in France while trying to keep cool.

The searing heat resembles scorching periods of unusual temperatures in the U.S. earlier this year. But the political responses in Europe and America are as opposite as winter and summer.

“Believe me, when I was a child it wasn’t 35 degrees [95 degrees Fahrenheit] in London in June. What we are seeing, not just in Britain but around the world, impels us to act,” Britain’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said Tuesday.

As the war in Iran has squeezed energy supplies globally, Europe has doubled down on its pledge to shift from fossil fuels to renewables. But it is also under pressure from the Trump administration to buy more American LNG. President Donald Trump frequently rails against European leaders for investing in what he calls “loser” energies, such as wind and solar.

“Understand climate change for what it is: a slow-moving phenomenon that ultimately will be addressed by better technologies. The biggest needle mover by far today is natural gas,” Wright, who led fracking-services company Liberty Energy before entering the Trump administration, told the conference this week.

AC gets heated

In essence, the U.S. is telling Europe not to care about climate change, even as the continent is reeling from its effects.

“You can’t really compare heat and cold deaths,” Friederike Otto, a climate science professor at Imperial College London, said in an email, noting that the connection with heat and mortality is much more direct than with cold. “Cold deaths are only an issue in countries that actually get cold, which is also the countries where we have the best data. But heat wave deaths are soaring in the Global South, in particular Africa.”

Air conditioning is one way to address the challenge, but its use has stirred political divisions across Europe. Some greens worry that widespread use has environmental impacts, puts more pressure on the grid and would require major retrofits to infrastructure that’s designed for cooler, wetter weather when it’s only needed for a narrow window of time. In France, the far-right National Rally has been calling for everyone to have access to it.

Trump himself has acknowledged that air conditioning can save lives, if it’s powered by fossil fuels. His assertions came as he announced the rollback of a key determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare.

“Fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions out of poverty all over the world, and you see it with the blackouts all over where they don’t use it,” he said in February, blaming renewable energy for blackouts and high electricity prices that he said limited peoples’ access to cooling.

“And people are dying because there was no air conditioning or there was no heating, lots of other things, bad things happened,” he said.

For many Europeans, this week’s heat wave is further proof that the political measures being taken by the continent to address climate impacts are necessary. They include an EU law that calls for a 90 percent reduction in climate pollution by 2040. The U.K. is aiming to cut emissions 87 percent by 2042.

“Even though the ones of us who work with it every day tend to use arguments of security and competitiveness probably more often than fighting climate change right now, the essence of what we do, the real reason why we need to do this, the crisis that will not go away is climate change,” Dan Jørgensen, the EU energy commissioner, said on the sidelines of London Climate Action Week.

‘Virtually impossible’ without climate change

An analysis released Friday by World Weather Attribution found that extreme heat hitting parts of Europe and the U.K. would have been “virtually impossible” just a few decades ago without fossil-fuel-driven climate change. Of more than 850 cities that scientists analyzed, 45 percent have broken or are expected to break their highest heat stress levels for June — a metric combining high heat and humidity to assess dangerous conditions for human health.

Rising temperatures in Europe have sparked fresh debate about the need for better cooling systems. And advocates worry that the impacts of heat will be even more severe in other places such as India, where there is less capacity to deal with it.

Heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States, even though air conditioning is more prevalent than in Europe. In 2023, the death toll from heat was at least 2,300 people, according to federal records that were removed from the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after Trump took office. Cold temperatures killed fewer than half as many people that year, the CDC said.

The Trump administration has cut programs aimed at tempering the dangers of heat. Proposed worker protections have stalled at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the U.S. Labor Department. And as electricity prices increased due to the war in Iran, the administration proposed zeroing out a $4.5 billion program to help low-income people pay their energy bills, including for heating and cooling.

Europe faces its own challenges. Lawmakers are locked in a debate over weakening the EU’s emissions trading system, and the bloc’s energy ministers met Friday under pressure from oil and gas producers to soften a law aimed at cutting methane pollution. Europe also remains dependent on the U.S. for natural gas as it weans itself off supplies from Russia.

But despite Wright’s efforts to downplay the heat threat — and climate change more broadly — politicians in Europe say they’re not deterred.

“Let’s just say this plainly, when Russia invaded Ukraine, some told us to ignore one fossil fuel shock and return to business as usual. And now, facing this second shock, just four years on, we hear the same arguments,” said Miliband, Britain’s energy secretary. “Those who are saying this are wrong.”