It was a crisp 54 degrees in Aberdeen, on the northeast coast of Scotland, last week when Kemi Badenoch, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, once again championed the country’s fossil fuel industry.
“The war on oil and gas must end,” she insisted, prompting applause from supporters in the port city, a major hub for petroleum extraction in the North Sea. “We need to get Britain drilling again.”
Eight days later, thermostats across southern England and Wales recorded soaring heat, with temperatures in London nearing 100 degrees. Schools closed, trains were canceled or delayed and some hospitals halted elective procedures. The opening session of London Climate Action Week, focused on improving extreme heat governance, was called off after Britain’s national weather service, the Met Office, issued a “red warning.”
For politicians like Ms. Badenoch, whose party won a special election in Aberdeen, the increasingly intense heat presents a challenge. How do they reconcile their support for the extraction and use of polluting energy sources that contribute to the warming of the planet, with the reality of a planet that already feels like it’s burning up?
A spokesman for Ms. Badenoch, who has called herself a “net zero skeptic,” did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in an interview this week with the right-leaning broadcaster GB News, Ms. Badenoch said that while it was “important that we do what we can to tackle climate change,” the country’s climate approaches are not “actually sorting anything out. All they have done is send jobs and emissions to other countries.”
An anticipated spike in heat-related mortality in Europe is already apparent. Five people have died from the heat in Italy, according to the country’s main news agency, including several who were working outside and a homeless man. In France, at least 40 people have drowned, many of them teenagers swimming in unsupervised areas. London’s ambulance service said that it had responded to its highest ever number of life-threatening emergencies on Wednesday.
Everyone agrees something must be done. But not everyone agrees on what that should be.
Increasingly, the answer from right-wing politicians is to focus on a short-term fix that almost everyone agrees is necessary — the installation of air-conditioning units in European homes, schools, public buildings and hospitals.
During intense heat waves, calling for improvement of the sometimes crumbling infrastructure of aging European cities can be an effective way of drawing attention to that problem without saying much about the longer-term, underlying cause: rising greenhouse gas emissions.
In France, far-right politicians who have advocated cutting net zero initiatives hope to gain from the heat wave, using it to accuse the government of failing to make the country more resilient, but also as a cultural issue against the hard left, which has often opposed the use of air-conditioning on environmental grounds.
“If I am elected president, I will put into place a massive air-conditioning plan,” Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally party, pledged on Friday, “starting in places with the most vulnerable populations.”
Ms. Le Pen argues that AC units do not exacerbate global warming, saying that “when environmentalists don’t want something, they twist the studies, they pull things out of context.”
New air-conditioning units have become greener in recent years, but they still contribute to climate change by guzzling electricity, which, if it doesn’t come from renewable sources, contributes to the emissions that warm the planet. These units also pump hot air outside buildings as they push cold air inside, adding to the already hot weather. And they put enormous strain on Europe’s aging electrical grid, especially when they are running full blast to ward off extreme heat.
In the context of northern Europe’s traditionally mild, temperate climate, some left-wing and green parties opposed AC and have instead favored renovating buildings with architectural fixes to keep them cool when it gets hot. But the dangers to health posed by this week’s heat wave are piling pressure on that view — and changing minds.
In the Belgian city of Ghent, which is run mostly by left-of-center politicians, the municipal website this week discouraged citizens from using air-conditioners, saying that “the best air-conditioner is a tree” and advising they use fans and request a free tree to plant outside their houses.
Maurits Vande Reyde, a right-wing member of the Flemish Parliament, responded to Ghent’s recommendations 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 wrote on Tuesday. “The most efficient and best solution. How many deaths would the government already have on its conscience with this kind of absurd advice?”
After The New York Times sent a request for comment, Ghent removed wording that read “avoid air-conditioners,” replacing it with the phrase “cool smartly.”
Thomas Dierckens, a spokesman for the mayor of Ghent, said in a written comment that the city was not against air-conditioning — noting that it had installed 30 portable air-conditioners into day care centers this week.
“Health always comes first” in a heat wave, he said.
Marine Tondelier, the head of the Green Party in France, acknowledged that she was “breaking a taboo” when she said on Tuesday that “there are places where we can no longer do without air-conditioning.”
In London, Sadiq Khan, the center-left Labour Party mayor, said on Thursday that AC would need to be installed in the capital’s schools, offices and hospitals, as he warned that London needed to “act now” to strengthen its resilience ahead of worse heat waves to come. And at the European level, Terry Reintke, co-president of the European Parliament’s Green group, said in an interview that some air-conditioning was necessary, alongside longer-term solutions like planting more green spaces.
Unlike in the United States, where climate change politics have become more divided during Mr. Trump’s terms, there is still broad support in Britain and Europe for taking action to tackle global warming.
In a survey last year by Eurobarometer, the European Union’s public opinion service, about 85 percent of respondents said that they consider climate change a serious problem for the world, and action against climate change a public-health priority. A survey in the United States last year showed a much smaller proportion of people who even believed that climate change was happening.
A wide body of research on European voters has found that extreme weather events linked to climate change can influence politics, but that such events do not guarantee a backlash to climate-skeptic parties.
A 2025 study by Jessica Haak, a political scientist at the University of Hamburg, found that abnormally high temperatures in Germany had delivered a small but meaningful increase in support for the Green Party, suggesting a link between extreme heat and support for climate action.
A similar study in 2022 by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found voters in areas affected by heat waves, droughts and other environmental events were more likely to support European politicians who backed climate action — but with an important catch. The authors found that support only increased when the economy was strong.
“In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007—2008, for example,” the authors write in the study, “a substantial reduction in environmental concerns was observable across all European regions.”
Europe’s far-right parties have tried to tap into economic concerns and focus attention on burdensome regulations. Governments are scrambling to respond to extreme weather, from floods to heat, meaning this can be fertile ground for voter frustration.
Last month, Nicola Procaccini, the co-chairman of the right-leaning European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the European Parliament, said that “instead of focusing on adaptation to climate change, investing resources in the protection of territories and people, the choice was made to sacrifice the growth of the European economy and support for people, especially the most vulnerable, on the altar of ‘climate mitigation.’”
In fact, scientists say that both adaptation and mitigation are urgently required. “Heat waves are becoming more frequent, longer and hotter with climate change, as a direct result of the fossil fuels we are releasing as a society,” Prof. Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University said in an emailed comment. “Our current climate is the least extreme we will live in our lifetimes, and certainly until we reach net zero, and we need to adapt urgently.”
In London this week, environmentalists were hoping that the intense weather would underscore their arguments.
“There is irony in the fact that a London Climate Action Week event had to be canceled due to extreme heat in a temperate, wealthy country,” said Chris Anderson, head of climate risk and resilience at Practical Action, an environmental group.
“We’re fully in favor of the decision for the well-being of attendees and panelists,” he said, “but it shows that extreme weather is becoming unpredictable and moving faster than people can adapt, even in the richest countries.”
Reporting was contributed by Mark Landler and Ségolène Le Stradic from Paris, Jim Tankersley from Berlin. Megan Specia from London and Koba Ryckewaert from Brussels.
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