More than 10,000 Europeans died above normal levels during a single week of extreme heat in late June. In France alone, officials have now identified 5,764 excess deaths during the heatwave that ran from June 17 through July 2.
These are not abstract climate projections or computer models predicting what might happen decades from now. These are bodies counted in hospitals, homes, nursing facilities and, in some places, overflowing mortuaries.
Yet Europe appears to be treating this extraordinary loss of life as though it were an unfortunate but unavoidable seasonal event.
It was neither.
The death toll should force a much more uncomfortable discussion about Europe’s energy crisis, its limited access to air conditioning and a political culture that has become remarkably tolerant of energy scarcity.
Thousands Dead in Europe, Dozens in America
The contrast with the United States is striking.
A major heatwave also swept across large portions of the United States around the Fourth of July, producing dangerous temperatures from the Midwest to the East Coast and straining regional power systems. At least 25 deaths had been publicly linked to the American heatwave in early reporting.
Europe, meanwhile, recorded approximately 10,650 excess deaths during the week of June 22 through June 28. More than 9,000 of those who died were 65 or older. EuroMOMO researchers said they could identify no major disease outbreak or other event capable of explaining the extraordinary mortality spike besides the extreme heat.
France subsequently estimated 5,764 excess deaths during its heatwave, including nearly 2,000 in the Paris region. Two-thirds of the victims were at least 75 years old, and more than half of the excess deaths occurred during just three days, June 25 through June 27.
Belgium reported another 1,747 deaths above expectations, representing excess mortality of 48 percent during the heatwave. European monitoring officials characterized France and Belgium as suffering “very high” excess mortality, while several other countries recorded moderate or lower increases. The attached reporting notes that Belgium’s death toll was the worst associated with any heatwave in its records dating to 2000.
This should be regarded as a continental emergency.
Instead, Europe seems resigned to it.
The Missing Air Conditioners
Extreme heat is dangerous everywhere. What distinguishes a manageable heatwave from a mass-casualty event is not merely the outdoor temperature. It is whether people can escape that temperature.
In the United States, air conditioning is treated as basic infrastructure. It is widespread in homes, offices, hospitals, shopping centers and senior-care facilities. In much of Europe, it remains optional, discouraged, difficult to install or financially burdensome to operate.
The International Energy Agency estimates that air-conditioning ownership in Europe is only about 20 percent.
That means the overwhelming majority of European households entered a record-breaking heatwave without the most effective technology available for protecting vulnerable residents.
France’s experience is especially revealing. Despite the lessons supposedly learned from the catastrophic 2003 heatwave, many hospitals, schools and nursing homes remain inadequately cooled. Reuters reported that nearly half of French elder-care facilities still lacked even an air-conditioned communal area as the 2026 heatwave struck. Funeral directors in some areas saw death rates triple and had to obtain refrigerated containers to hold the bodies.
This is not simply a meteorological failure. It is an infrastructure failure.
The Energy Crisis Did Not Cause the Heat—But It Left Europe Exposed
There is not yet a government database identifying which victims refrained from purchasing or operating air conditioning because electricity was too expensive. Public-health statistics rarely capture such decisions.
The author’s conclusion, however, is that Europe’s continuing energy crisis materially increased the continent’s vulnerability.
The causal chain is not difficult to understand.
Europe has unusually low air-conditioning penetration. Electricity remains expensive. Older and poorer residents are the most likely to live in buildings without modern cooling. Those who do own portable or fixed air conditioners face a substantial financial incentive to restrict their use. When extreme heat arrives, those conditions translate into greater exposure, particularly during dangerous overnight temperatures when the body has no opportunity to recover.
European household electricity prices remain far above their pre-2022 levels. Eurostat reported that the average EU household paid €28.96 per 100 kilowatt-hours during the second half of 2025. Germany’s price approached €38 per 100 kilowatt-hours during the first half of that year.
Europe’s broader electricity costs also continue to damage its economic competitiveness. Current industrial electricity prices are roughly twice those in the United States and substantially higher than those in China. The energy shock that followed the loss of inexpensive Russian gas has not been fully resolved; it has been absorbed into household bills, industrial closures, public budgets and declining expectations.
The consequences extend far beyond factories.
When energy becomes expensive, households economize. They delay purchases. They tolerate uncomfortable temperatures. They avoid running electrical equipment. Governments and institutions defer installations. Nursing homes make do with cooled common rooms rather than individual rooms. Schools close instead of being upgraded. Officials distribute water and announce heat warnings because creating genuinely cooled environments would require energy, equipment and money.
That is the point at which an energy crisis becomes a public-health crisis.
Europe Has Made Energy Scarcity Normal
The most disturbing aspect of Europe’s response may be the apparent lack of outrage.
More than 10,000 excess deaths in one week should produce investigations, emergency appropriations and a fundamental reconsideration of energy and building policies. Instead, much of the official discussion remains focused on adapting behavior: drink water, close shutters, avoid the afternoon sun and locate a public cooling center.
Those measures are useful, but they are not a substitute for abundant, affordable electricity and widespread mechanical cooling.
Europe has spent years teaching its population that consuming less energy is virtuous. Air conditioning has frequently been portrayed as wasteful, environmentally suspect or culturally unnecessary. Governments have promoted higher indoor temperature settings, restricted visible equipment on older buildings, imposed demanding efficiency and refrigerant rules and encouraged citizens to tolerate warmer interiors.
No single regulation caused thousands of deaths. Historic buildings, demographic aging, social isolation and an unusually intense heatwave all contributed.
But policies do not have to directly order people to remain in dangerously hot rooms to produce deadly outcomes. A policy environment that makes energy expensive, cooling uncommon and installation difficult can achieve the same result indirectly.
In the author’s assessment, Europe has developed a form of energy austerity so deeply embedded that the public has begun to accept conditions that would provoke political fury in the United States.
Schools without cooling are accepted. Nursing homes without cooling are accepted. Apartments that become uninhabitable during summer are accepted. Elderly people dying alone in overheated buildings are described as vulnerable casualties of extreme weather rather than victims of inadequate infrastructure.
This is not resilience. It is resignation.
China Is Selling Europe the Cooling It Failed to Build
The market is already responding, but the response offers another warning about Europe’s decline.
As temperatures rose, European consumers rushed to buy lower-cost Chinese air conditioners. Companies such as Midea, Gree and Haier have been positioned to satisfy demand that European policy and infrastructure failed to anticipate.
That is economically significant.
Europe allowed its energy system to become costly and fragile. It discouraged or neglected widespread cooling. It failed to adequately retrofit its housing, healthcare and senior-care infrastructure. Then, when the human consequences became impossible to ignore, its citizens turned to Chinese manufacturers for affordable relief.
The pattern mirrors Europe’s wider industrial predicament. The continent establishes ambitious restrictions, tolerates high operating costs, loses manufacturing competitiveness and eventually imports the products necessary to manage the consequences.
The air-conditioner purchases are not merely a retail trend. They are another transfer of market share, manufacturing scale and technological influence toward China.
For investors, the episode illustrates a larger structural transformation. Europe’s energy crisis is no longer confined to natural-gas prices or energy-intensive factories. It is shaping demand for appliances, distributed power, grid upgrades, building retrofits, battery storage, cooling technology and healthcare infrastructure.
Cheap Energy Is Life-Saving Infrastructure
Europe’s heatwave death toll should end the fiction that energy abundance and public welfare are competing objectives.
Affordable electricity is not a luxury. It powers hospitals, refrigeration, transportation, communications, water systems and the machines that keep human beings alive during dangerous temperatures.
Air conditioning is not simply a matter of comfort. For an elderly person with cardiovascular or respiratory disease, it can be the difference between surviving a heatwave and becoming part of an excess-mortality estimate.
Europe’s energy crisis helped turn an extreme weather event into a mass-casualty event. High energy prices discouraged cooling investment and consumption. Policies built around conservation rather than abundance reinforced a culture in which inadequate cooling became normal. Economic stagnation and declining expectations made governments and citizens increasingly willing to tolerate conditions that should have been unacceptable.
More than 10,000 excess deaths should not be quietly absorbed into a statistical report. They should be treated as evidence of institutional failure—and as a warning that societies unable or unwilling to provide abundant, reliable and affordable energy will eventually pay for that failure in more than lost industrial production.
They will pay for it in human lives.
