France recorded 2,025 excess deaths in the week of 22–28 June at the peak of a heatwave that saw temperatures approach 41°C in Paris and left half the nation under red alert. Belgium recorded 1,222 excess deaths — a 39 percent increase in mortality — the Netherlands approximately 480. Fourteen countries set new national all-time or June temperature records during the event, including Hungary at 42°C, Germany at 41.8°C, and the Czech Republic at 41.9°C. Scientists at the UK Met Office and the University of Reading described the readings as “extraordinary,” noting that records were broken not by fractions of a degree but by two degrees or more. It was the second heatwave of summer 2026; a third is now forecast for parts of Britain and France within days. Europe is warming at roughly twice the global average rate, according to the Copernicus climate service.
The received wisdom
The dominant framing in elite media and political commentary is consistent and passionate: this is climate change killing people in real time, and the governments of Europe — particularly the conservative governments of Hungary, Italy, and the post-Starmer United Kingdom — are not doing enough to cut emissions. The fossil fuel industry, the story goes, has spent decades blocking the kind of decisive green transition that would prevent these deaths. Mitigation — net zero, the energy transition, binding emissions targets — is the only serious response. Adaptation measures like cooling centres and public health warnings are at best a sticking plaster; the real work is stopping the warming. The 2,025 deaths in France are not a policy failure in any narrow, governable sense — they are the predictable consequence of decades of insufficient ambition.
To this view, every sceptical note about the pace of decarbonisation — including concerns about industrial competitiveness, energy security, or the burden on working-class households — is, implicitly, advocacy for more dead French pensioners. The moral weight of 2,000 excess deaths in a single week is intended to foreclose the conversation about the trade-offs involved.
A different read
The deaths are real and the grief is warranted. But the mitigation-only framing is doing something intellectually dishonest: it is taking a present, governable crisis and projecting it entirely onto a future, slow-moving one, thereby absolving current European governments of responsibility for failures that happened on their watch.
Here is the inconvenient arithmetic. France recorded excess deaths in 2003 of approximately 15,000 in a single heatwave — a number burned into French public memory. The country subsequently invested in heat action plans, early warning systems, and public health infrastructure specifically because of that disaster. Twenty-three years later, with temperatures again approaching the same extreme levels, 2,025 people are dead in one week. The French health ministry has itself acknowledged that figure is likely an underestimate. That is progress of a kind — 2,025 is not 15,000 — but it is also evidence that adaptation investment remains dramatically insufficient relative to the warming that has already occurred, independent of anything that happens to emissions trajectories over the next thirty years.
This distinction matters enormously. The climate movement has tended to treat adaptation — building cooling infrastructure, redesigning urban heat islands, changing building codes, training medical services for heat emergencies — as a second-order concern, even a kind of defeatism. The logic is that serious investment in adaptation implies accepting permanent higher temperatures, which reduces political pressure for mitigation. That logic may be emotionally coherent in an advocacy context, but as governance it is an indefensible trade-off. People are dying from temperatures that already exist, not from temperatures that might exist in 2060. Germany set a new all-time national temperature record of 41.8°C; none of Germany’s building stock, most of which was constructed before 1980, was designed for those conditions. That is a design and regulatory failure with a legislative fix available today.
There is a class dimension to this that polite climate commentary consistently elides. The people dying in heatwaves are overwhelmingly elderly, poor, and socially isolated — not the laptop class that drives European climate politics. Belgium’s health ministry noted that roughly half its 1,222 excess deaths were aged 85 and over. Air conditioning, the most effective individual heat-mitigation technology available, is expensive to buy, expensive to run, and associated — in a characteristic piece of green moralising — with higher electricity consumption and therefore higher emissions. The result is an implicit policy position in which affluent Europeans cycle through talking points about carbon footprints while elderly people in un-air-conditioned apartments cook to death. That is not a position any serious conservative or any serious progressive should be comfortable defending.
The comparison with the American South or the Gulf states is instructive. These are regions with regularly extreme heat that have built their built environment accordingly: insulation, shade, near-universal air conditioning, adapted working hours. They have done so not through green transition but through market adaptation to climate reality. The deaths-per-capita in extreme heat events in Houston are substantially lower than in Paris at equivalent temperatures. One need not celebrate the Gulf’s emissions record to acknowledge that adaptation works, that it scales, and that it saves lives now rather than in 2070.
None of this is an argument against reducing emissions. It is an argument that the binary — mitigate or fail — is analytically lazy and, given the current death toll, morally unserious.
What to watch
Watch whether the French government’s post-heatwave review results in mandatory building retrofit standards or expanded public cooling infrastructure — or whether it produces the usual rhetoric followed by inaction. The incoming third heatwave will test whether public health systems have updated their emergency protocols since June. More broadly, watch whether the EU’s energy ministers use the summer mortality figures to accelerate adaptation funding under the climate transition budget, or whether the money remains locked in the mitigation-only framework that has dominated to date.
— J