By Rafael PINTO BORGES
If not for the piles of regulation produced by the Berlaymont, air conditioning would likely be far easier and cheaper to obtain by hundreds of millions of Europeans.
The heatwave ravaging Europe might be the worst in history. Drama-prone as the climate debate tends to be in the West, the current crisis really is bad: half of the continent's 850 largest cities have just undergone their worst heat stress. At almost 37°C, never has Britain faced such heat in June. In Berlin, the police used water cannons to cool pedestrians. In France, there have been thousands of excess deaths.
What about Brussels ? The EU establishment has long been a pitiless adversary of air conditioning. In the climate religion professed by the Union's officials, cooling is the deadliest of deadly sins: it is a symbol of the developed world's profligacy, of its wastefulness and hedonism. To those initiated in the sect, air conditioning is a powerful symbol of our collective naughtiness, an eloquent demonstration of all that is wrong in our relationship with nature. With narrative coherence on the line, Europe's overlords knew they could have the EU publicly succumb to the tempting apple of artificial cooling. Ursula von der Leyen therefore ordered air conditioning switched off in the European Commission's Berlaymont headquarters- but only on floors one to seven, where ordinary staff work. On floors 8 to 13, where she and her fellow commissioners have their offices, the air conditioning remained blissfully on.
It would perhaps be uncharitable to call this hypocritical. Von der Leyen, after all, is no ordinary woman. Together with her commissioners, she is, after all, the great helmswoman of the mighty European ship. As a leader, her time and comfort are precious; only if properly cooled can the Commission president adequately serve the people-and, by extension, the environment. If not for her gargantuan efforts and the piles of regulation produced by the Berlaymont, air conditioning would likely be far easier and cheaper to obtain by hundreds of millions of Europeans. Perhaps more than the current 20% of European homes (compared to 90% in the United States or almost 80% in China) would be equipped with the devices. In a way, ensuring air-conditioned indulgence for von der Leyen guarantees that millions of Europeans boil in the hot months, all to the glory of Mother Gaia. It's the definition of efficiency.
Tongue-in-cheekness aside, the newfound honesty of the Brusselians is certainly liberating. After all, this "let them eat cake" mentality of Europe's bien-pensant ruling classes was never a well-kept secret. Von der Leyen telling Europe's masses-and, remarkably, her own lowly staff-to suffer in the crushing heat while her own AC stays on is remarkably reminiscent of COP29, when the world's political and business leaders flew to gas-rich Azerbaijan in the luxury of private jets-while condemning the rest of us for such egregious sins against nature as... turning our air conditioning on.
The insanity of European political elites was further exemplified this week by France's Climate Minister Monique Barbut. With thousands dead and crowds jumping to the Seine for relief from the brutal temperatures, Barbut claimed, incredibly, that she would be "horrified" if air conditioning were to become widespread in the future.
This sanctimonious drivel is increasingly hard to understand-or tolerate. As a matter of fact, there's nothing inherently evil about air conditioning. The equipment is not significantly polluting or environment-unfriendly per se; rather, what can make it problematic is the source of the energy it consumes. Indeed, such energy can, if sourced from oil or gas, greatly increase a country's carbon emissions.
But that does not need to be the case. It obviously will be if a country is delusional to the point of closing its nuclear power plants, a 100% clean source of energy, with the purpose of replacing them with coal-based facilities. That is indeed what countries like Germany have done-driven to that madness by the environmentalist lobby. By increasing-not decreasing, as the delusional degrowth sect tells us to do-energy production, Europe can have cake and eat it, too. Nuclear power will keep Europeans fresh and our atmosphere clean.
A saner policy was the one followed decades ago by the genius statesman who made Singapore one of the world's most prosperous countries-Lee Kuan Yew. For LKY, air conditioning was not a sinful luxury; it was basic infrastructure, fundamental for a population's quality of life and productivity. As he famously put it,
Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.
Instead of having von der Leyen preach to us from the top of her ivory tower in the Berlaymont, perhaps a better idea would be to learn from Lee-and start living decently again.
Original article: europeanconservative.com