Europe Burns Under Record Summer Heat Wave

This summer’s heat across Europe benefits almost nobody by any measurable amount and harms a great many people by a great deal: the elderly who die in unventilated apartments, the outdoor labourers in Iberia and southern Italy whose bodies are simply asked to do more than physiology permits, the residents of drought-struck regions watching their water and their crops fail together, and the communities near the wildfires who lose homes built over generations in an afternoon. Against this we may set the pleasure of the tourist who gets a hotter beach holiday, and the profit of the air-conditioning manufacturer. The arithmetic is uncomfortable, but the arithmetic is the argument, and it does not balance.

Let us count more carefully, because the professor of sociology at Hamburg, Stefan Eye-cot, has framed the real question correctly even if he answers it too cautiously: whether this summer becomes a genuine reckoning or merely another entry in an increasingly long ledger of ignored warnings. I am less interested in whether Europeans feel reckoned with than in whether their legislators act as though they do. Sentiment is not evidence of policy. A continent can grieve its dead and still rebuild in the same floodplains and same tinder-dry forests next spring, and grief without reform is merely a pleasure taken in one’s own conscience at no cost to one’s habits.

Here is the calculation the politicians will not make publicly, so I shall make it for them. Every year of delay in adapting infrastructure, water management, and building codes to a hotter climate is a year in which the pain is transferred forward and multiplied, because heat-deaths are not linear with temperature but accelerate past certain thresholds, and drought compounds on drought as reservoirs fail to refill. A policy that spends now on shaded public spaces, on cooling centres, on water infrastructure, on fire breaks, produces pleasure that is certain, near, and durable. A policy that spends now on the appearance of concern - a summit, a communique, a pledge revisited in five years - produces pleasure that is illusory, and pain deferred is pain compounded, like a debt whose interest is measured in bodies rather than currency.

The politicians face an incentive structure I recognize instantly, having spent my life arguing against similar structures in the penal law: the costs of prevention are immediate, visible, and attributable to the minister who spends them, while the costs of inaction are diffuse, delayed, and attributable to no one in particular - the weather, fate, an act of God. A minister who builds cooling infrastructure this year can be blamed for the tax that pays for it. A minister who does nothing will not be blamed for the deaths next August, because by then the news cycle will have moved to some other continent’s catastrophe. This is not stupidity. It is a rational response to an irrational incentive, and the legislator who wishes to serve the greatest happiness must change the incentive, not merely lecture the minister on his duty.

What, then, should the rational legislator do? He should stop treating adaptation spending as a discretionary line item subject to electoral cycles and treat it as he would treat the maintenance of a dam - because the actuarial reality is precisely that of a structure under increasing strain. He should weight the calculus toward the populations who suffer most and complain least: the outdoor workers, the rural elderly, the poor who cannot afford air conditioning in the first instance. Their pain does not make headlines the way a wildfire does, but it is real pain, suffered by real people, and it counts exactly as much as anyone else’s, no more and no less.

Whether this summer becomes the reckoning Professor Eye-cot gestures toward depends on nothing so vague as collective consciousness. It depends on whether next year’s budget contains a line item that this year’s did not. Everything else - the speeches, the solemn photographs of scorched forests, the columns like this one - is merely the smoke. The fire is in the ledger.