London hit nearly 100 degrees last week. In other parts of Europe temperatures hit 104 degrees on Sunday. Temperatures hit record highs in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic and Austria.
The New York Times looked at all of this and decided the real problem was MAGA hat wearers who love them some air conditioning.
Reporters Michael D. Shear and Jeanna Smialek published a piece on June 26 framing the push for air conditioning in Europe as a "far right" political project. The thesis, to the extent one exists: adopting American-style AC would undermine climate goals, and the politicians pushing for it are doing so for ideological reasons rather than concern for public safety.
One of those politicians is Kemi Badenoch, leader of Britain's Conservative Party, whose spokesman told the Times it was "important that we do what we can to tackle climate change." Badenoch herself told GB News that European climate policies weren't "actually sorting anything out. All they have done is sent jobs and emissions to other countries." The Times treated this as evidence of dangerous right-wing populism rather than a statement of observable fact.
In Belgium, the city of Ghent's municipal website advises residents that "the best air-conditioner is a tree." Maurits Vande Reyde, a right-wing member of the Flemish Parliament, responded on social media: "It is absurd that all governments in our country, under pressure from left-green mumbo-jumbo, advise against the use of air-conditioning." He added: "How many deaths would the government already have on its conscience with this kind of absurd advice?"
That's not a rhetorical question. Heat kills elderly Europeans every summer, over a thousand have died since this heat wave began a week ago in France alone, and the continent's resistance to widespread air conditioning — rooted in a mix of building codes, energy policy, and environmental ideology — turns every heat wave into a body count. The Times piece didn't dwell on that part.
What the piece did include, almost as self-parody, was a quote from Chris Anderson, head of climate risk and resilience at Practical Action, an environmental group. Anderson noted: "There is irony in the fact that a London Climate Action Week event had to be cancelled due to extreme heat." The irony apparently stopped there. Nobody at the Times followed that thread to its logical conclusion — that maybe the climate strategy isn't working if its own conferences can't survive the climate.
The framing is the tell. A Belgian legislator asking why his government tells people to sit under a tree instead of turning on the AC isn't a "far right" position. It's common sense at 100 degrees. But the Times needs a political villain for every story, and when the story is "people want to not die of heat stroke," the villain becomes anyone who suggests plugging in a Carrier unit.
Ghent tells its residents to find a tree. London cancels its own climate events because of the heat. And the New York Times calls the people who want air conditioning extremists.
Somewhere in that sequence is a newspaper that used to cover the news.
