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Brussels, 28 May 2026
Are you feeling the heat of this week’s heatwave? It is easy to lay the blame at the feet of climate change, but a new MCC Brussels analysis identifies an important and unacknowledged cause of your hot misery: the European Union’s relentless drive for sustainability over human comfort.
This drive has a real consequence. 2024 saw an estimated 62,775 heat-related deaths in Europe. While harder to quantify, the economic and health impact of sustained high living temperatures, especially at night, could easily run to hundreds of billions of euros. When it comes to mitigating the effects of hot weather, Europe is an international outlier in the use of active cooling (such as air-conditioning), with only 10% of households owning an air-conditioning unit compared to 90% in the US and Japan.
The new analysis exposes three interlocking mechanisms through which EU regulation – adopted and extended by many national governments – has resulted in ever warmer homes over the summer:
- A moral crusade against air-conditioning
- Building regulations which prioritise winter heating efficiency over summer comfort
- Market incentives which reward insulation over cooling technologies
Backed by a number of specific regional and local regulations – such as façade controls, heritage rules, co-owner votes, or noise limits – Europe’s ever-hotter summers are becoming especially unbearable.
Jacob Reynolds of MCC Brussels said:
‘Europe’s sustainability regime has produced perverse outcomes: homes are being made cheaper to warm in winter, but at the cost of creating the conditions for exhausting heat in the summer.’
‘The mantra of Net Zero has unfairly demonised air-conditioning and forced Europeans to ‘suck it up’ during hot periods rather than easily-installable technologies to provide cool, comfortable homes’.
‘This is not resilience or efficiency. It is another example of green austerity, where the living standards of ordinary Europeans are sacrificed to meet sustainability targets’.
MCC Brussels calls for a basic change in principle: cooling must be considered as much a right as heating – not a form of climate decadence.
MCC Brussels recommends that European and national authorities:
- Stop pretending that passive cooling is enough where design, climate or urban conditions make it plainly inadequate
- Remove excessive planning and co-ownership barriers to quiet, efficient residential cooling
- Amend the regime of EPC certification which currently directly penalises air-conditioning even when it is directly necessary - we must end the green fiction that a building is successful because it performs well on an annual energy model while failing the people who live inside it
MCC Brussels executive director, Frank Furedi, adds:
‘Europe’s climate bureaucracy loves to talk about adaptation. But when citizens try to adapt by cooling their homes, they meet the same machine: permits, prohibitions, guilt, delay and cost.’
‘The lesson is simple. A home that cannot be kept safely cool is not sustainable. It is just a well-insulated oven.’
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ANALYSIS
The MCC Brussels analysis reviews both EU and national regulations and especially applies to Eastern Europe. It analyses the result of the EU’s 2002 Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (and its update in 2024), the 2024 F-gas Regulation, as well as national systems including France’s RT2012 and RE2020, the Dutch BENG/TOjuli framework, Germany’s GEG and DIN 4108-2, Belgium’s regional EPB/PEB systems, Ireland’s DEAP/BER methodology and relevant planning, façade, condominium and noise rules across Western Europe.
Fundamentally, the problem rests with the Net Zero assumptions baked into the EU’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive and its desire to transition the entire building stock into "zero-emission buildings" that produce zero emissions – but which offer zero cooling in hot periods.
A moral crusade against air-conditioning
The sustainability obsession of European politicians is well-documented. The EU has adopted ever-stricter targets to attempt to reach Net Zero. But one of the great ironies of the efforts to reduce the pace of global warming is that Europe is less and less ready to deal with its effects. This is especially true in the case of warming buildings: air-conditioning has been identified as a significant use of energy, and one to be reduced
The EU Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings explicitly identifies air-conditioning as a problem, stating that it creates "considerable problems at peak load times, increasing the cost of electricity and disrupting the energy balance". To deal with the “problem” of air-conditioning, the directive demands that builders invest in “passive cooling” instead (things such as shutters, blinds, airflow). The problem is immediate and obvious: “passive cooling” is in many cases only a stop-gap solution and cannot bring temperatures down in periods of sustained heat.
The EU’s overall approach is summed up by a 2022 European Environment Agency report which states that air-conditioning is a “social and just transition issue” and which blames people for using air-conditioning because it “can prevent people from becoming accustomed to natural heat”.
Building regulations which prioritise winter heating efficiency over summer comfort
One area where EU and national legislation has caused an undoubted deterioration in summer living standards is the obsessive focus on winter efficiency at the expense of summer liveability. By building new homes (and retrofitting existing ones) with insulation, heat recovery systems, extensive large glazing and other heat-retaining technologies, EU and national legislation has created a class of buildings that simply cannot be effectively cooled in the summer months.
This is what can be called a winter-efficiency trap. Buildings have been sealed, insulated and modelled to satisfy annual energy targets, heating-demand metrics and decarbonisation scores, while too often underweighting summer heat, bedroom temperatures, realistic ventilation, solar gain, future heatwaves and whether residents can actually open their windows at night.
A new-build block of flats may require very little heating in the winter, but often lack any tools to remove heat in the summer – especially in inner-city environments where opening windows may not be feasible due to noise and pollution concerns.
Market incentives which reward insulation over cooling technologies
One of the EU’s most visible interventions in the housing market has been the mandatory introduction of energy performance certificates (EPCs). By making the display and advertising of an EPC a mandatory part of the rental and purchase market, the EU has significantly changed the housing market – with tenants and buyers encouraged to view an ‘efficient’ EPC as a significant positive.
But the problem is that the EPC regime exclusively focuses on energy use, cost, and greenhouse gas emissions, and avoids consideration of how buildings may warm in the summer. Builders and landlords are incentivised to bring total winter warming costs down without any consideration for the effect on heat levels in the summer. Indeed, installing an air-conditioning unit would negatively impact the EPC rating even if it was strictly necessary for avoiding intolerable and unhealthy heat during warm periods.
National regulations which make AC installation a bureaucratic minefield
Across Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, fixed air-conditioning is not formally banned, but is hemmed in by a dense mesh of planning rules, environmental permits, noise limits, heritage controls, landlord consent and co-ownership approval. For apartment dwellers in particular, an outdoor unit is rarely a private consumer choice. It often becomes a question for neighbours, building managers, municipal officials and, in historic areas, cultural authorities.
The result is a distinctly European system of bureaucratic deterrence. Governments and regulators present shutters, restraint and “energy sobriety” as the preferred answer to hotter summers, while external compressors are treated as visual clutter, noise hazards and interventions in shared property.
