🚨How the EU makes the heatwave unbearable
Feeling the heatwave? 🥵 It’s easy to lay all the blame on climate change, but a new analysis from MCC Brussels identifies a much closer-to-home culprit: the EU’s relentless push for green sustainability over human comfort.
Europe is currently an international outlier in active cooling. Only 10% of European households own an AC unit, compared to 90% in the US and Japan. The consequences are real: 2024 saw an estimated 62,775 heat-related deaths across Europe.
We exposes how EU regulations have locked citizens into warmer homes, with three main culprits:
🚫The Crusade Against AC:
Bureaucrats push "passive cooling" (like blinds and shutters), falsely claiming AC prevents people from "becoming accustomed to natural heat."
♨️Oven-Like Buildings:
Modern regulations mandate heavily insulated, sealed homes that trap winter warmth perfectly—but turn into unliveable green ovens during sustained summer heatwaves.
📋Bureaucratic Deterrence:
Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) directly penalise AC installation, while a dense mesh of planning rules, noise limits, and heritage controls make putting in an outdoor unit a legal minefield.
Behind all of this? EU-mandated green rules.
Europe’s sustainability regime has produced perverse outcomes: homes are being made cheaper to warm in winter, but at the cost of creating the conditions for exhausting heat in the summer.
The mantra of Net Zero has unfairly demonised air-conditioning and forced Europeans to ‘suck it up’ during hot periods rather than easily-installable technologies to provide cool, comfortable homes.
‼️This is not resilience or efficiency. It is another example of green austerity, where the living standards of ordinary Europeans are sacrificed to meet sustainability targets.