During his inaugural speech on Jan. 1, Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
It certainly feels warm these days.
As temperatures climbed during the heat wave that blanketed much of the eastern United States, the mayor took to social media with a familiar message from the government. “New York: it’s hot out there, and the power grid is working overtime to keep us cool,” he tweeted. “Set your AC to 78 degrees, turn off lights/electronics you’re not using, and unplug what you can.”
This is the real face of the political left: Individual comfort and convenience should be subordinated to collective priorities, with government officials deciding how much energy ordinary people ought to consume.
Over the pond in Europe, we are seeing the effects of that warm glow of collectivism in full force. Decades of climate policy, energy restrictions and cultural hostility toward air conditioning have left millions of Europeans sweltering without one of the greatest public health innovations of the modern age.
They are trying to stay cool with fire trucks spraying water in public squares and parks. Even hospitals and the homes of medically fragile individuals are overheating.
In a Wall Street Journal report on the continent’s heat wave, the paper introduced Luca Funaro, a 32-year-old Parisian with a rare genetic illness who relies on both a wheelchair and a ventilator. Despite his condition, his neighbors have spent two years blocking his request to install an air-conditioning unit in his apartment courtyard because they say it would be too loud. His family has spent thousands of dollars fighting them in court while he endures record-breaking heat.
It is hard to imagine a clearer illustration of the cruelty of collectivism in practice.
A healthy group of neighbors has decided that one disabled man’s ability to breathe comfortably matters less than preserving their preferred aesthetic and soundscape. They insist they are acting for the common good. The person who bears the greatest burden is the one least capable of bearing it.
And the price is being counted in bodies.
The only reliably cool buildings in parts of Paris are its morgues. Funeral homes and mortuaries in and around the French capital have been overwhelmed in recent weeks, with some running out of refrigerated space for the dead. France recorded roughly 1,000 excess deaths during the peak of the heat wave, most of them among the elderly.
This is the absurdity of Europe’s climate regime. After spending fortunes on emissions targets, regulations and green-energy schemes, officials are still reduced to medieval improvisation when the weather turns dangerous: Spray water in the square and hope the old people make it through the night.
Ironically, many American progressives openly aspire to recreate Europe’s model.
Sen. Bernie Sanders responded to the heat wave by tweeting, “Europe is suffering through its worst heat wave in recorded history. This week, 3 dozen US states will likely see record-breaking temperatures. No, Mr. Trump. Climate change is not a ‘hoax.’ We must stop fossil fuel industry greed and save the planet.”
Sanders is right about one thing. Europe offers an important lesson. Just not the one he intends.
The lesson is that wealthy societies survive climate extremes by adapting to them. Americans adapted to hot summers with widespread air conditioning, modern electrical grids, affordable energy and buildings designed to keep people alive when temperatures soar.
Europe chose a different path.
There is something almost perversely petty about these policies.
According to MIT, heating buildings contributes significantly more to greenhouse gas emissions than cooling them. Yet no serious European politician is proposing that families give up artificial heat in January.
Americans shouldn’t be too smug, though. We have our own version of climate dogma.
The very reason New York City’s electrical grid is straining under the weight of millions of air conditioners is because Democrats spent years crusading to shutter the Indian Point nuclear power plant, finally succeeding in 2020 and 2021. Indian Point supplied roughly a quarter of New York City’s electricity without emitting carbon dioxide.
It wasn’t replaced by windmills or solar panels. It was replaced almost one-for-one by natural gas. New York lost one of the cleanest, most reliable sources of electricity it had just as electrification became the centerpiece of the state’s climate agenda.
The result is almost comical: Politicians lecture New Yorkers to conserve electricity during heat waves because they eliminated the carbon-free power plant that helped make abundant electricity possible in the first place.
This is not science. It is ideology.
And like most ideological projects, it comes wrapped in paternalism. Ordinary people cannot be trusted to decide what they need.
Europe’s leaders prefer to congratulate themselves on their moral superiority. But there is nothing virtuous about a policy regime that makes people less able to survive the world as it actually exists.
At this rate, they may kill more people in the name of fighting climate change than climate change would kill in societies allowed to adapt to it.
That is the warm glow of collectivism.
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