One distinguishing factor between Germans and Americans is air-conditioning. Me, in a US hotel room? The first order of business is to turn it off. Some quirk of evolution means my organism is unequipped to handle the temperature gap of a small ice age between indoor and outdoor.
For years, I took the obsession with A/C as proof they couldn’t deal with something as natural as the weather – one of those quintessential US defects, like not understanding why Europeans walk to football stadiums.
Then came June. Germany’s longest heatwave on record. And we discovered there’s a big difference between turning the air-conditioning off – and having none to turn on.
At Düsseldorf University Hospital, heart patients recovering from surgery lay sweating in temperatures of 38C. The ward was built in 2014, with ensuite bathrooms, TV and wifi – but no AC.
It’s not an isolated problem. Freiburg has just 25 mobile cooling units for more than 1,200 rooms. Only a third of German hospitals have air-conditioned wards at all. A surgeon friend told me her operating theatre reached a joyous 26C.
Which makes me wonder why, in this century, this country, we tolerate an estimated 5,000 heat deaths a year rather than simply adapting.
One reason: for decades, nobody thought we’d need it – AC was a luxury for people too soft to handle summer. And caused sinusitis, jawohl.
The second: eco-ideology. Once the temperatures started to rise, anyone proposing to adapt to climate change stood accused of undermining the fight against it, as sabotaging the greater cause. Because, god forbid, if we learned to cope with heat waves, why make any effort to reduce your CO2 footprint?
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Which makes Green politicians now demanding an immediate air-conditioning action plan look rather hypocritical. Until June, AC was a climate killer to them – guzzling energy, running on dangerous refrigerants, the Ewigkeitschemikalien (“forever chemicals”), and heating the planet even further. Heat-protection plans – Hitzeschutzmaßnahmen – often ignored AC altogether, while building rules still make it a hassle to install.
The far right hasn’t helped either. In May, just before temperatures topped 40C, Hamburg’s AfD announced that “scientists called off the climate apocalypse”. After Germany’s hottest June on record, the same party now demands air-conditioning for all.
To add to these – dangerous – absurdities, there’s eco-terrorism. Last weekend, my train journey from Düsseldorf to Cologne was disrupted by an extreme-left group calling itself “Kommando Angry Birds”. They had set fire to two cable ducts, using a timer and liquid barbecue fuel.
The group justified the attack on eco-friendly (!) railways by claiming industrial civilisation causes “mass dying” and that destroying production chains would benefit “plants, animals and many people”.
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Not, apparently, the plants they burned beside the track or the thousands of passengers stranded for hours – having escaped major accidents on the tracks only by a stroke of luck, because the signalling systems did not fail as a result of the fire.
Domestic intelligence says it won’t be the last such attack. And we will wait for ever to get an explanation of exactly how arson will help climate protection. Because there isn’t one. Instead, already frustrated rail users will get back into their (climatised) cars.
In the meantime, however, it would help if Germany could agree that fighting climate change and adapting to it aren’t mutually exclusive. Thinking they are is one of Germany’s hottest delusions.
