Why are our homes and cities all so hot?

This is the Guardian. Today, why can't the UK cope when it gets hot, hot, hot? If you're listening outside the UK, you might be forgiven the eye roll. The Brits, obsessing over the weather, tell us something new. But this week's Heat Wave across Britain and much of Europe doesn't feel like an ordinary event. Take it from Fiona Harvey, the Guardian's Environment Editor. You know, we get heat waves in this country, but they're usually in July or August. We're still only in May. And just a few weeks ago, people had their heating on. People were running around in jumpers and long trisers and so on, you know. At its hottest, the countries saw a record breaking 35 degrees. Sweaty, maybe feeling unwell, unable to sleep. We've been talking about these tropical nights, which is astonishing for the UK. In short, I am allowed to be cranky because it's very, very hot. Absolutely. I'm not going in absolute. We should all be cranky. We're all, we have the combination of toddlers. And this isn't just about the fact that we're not acclimatised to tropical nights. It's our entire infrastructure. Homes, schools, hospitals, office blocks, most of which weren't built for the climate we now have. We've seen the heat records from May, not just surpassed, but really shattered. You know, normally heat records are surpassed by, you know, a fraction of a degree, something like that. But this time we're talking about more like two degrees, nearly. And that's a lot. From the Guardian, I'm not unique, but today in focus, if this is the new normal, how do we adapt? Fiona, it is hot. It was much hotter earlier this week, but it is still very warm today. You are the Guardian's environment editor. I'll cool calm voice. Now, before I get to the big questions of climate change, how do you deal with a heat wave? Well, I think it's important to try to take the basic measures first. If you're out, obviously, we're sunscreen, where loose clothes, you know, light clothes can help. I'm not doing that today, but, you know, the cottons. Do as I say, not as I do. But tick those kind of obvious precautions, where are hats, you know, something to, to shield you? Are you a baseball hat, a bucket hat? What kind of hat do I? Bucket hats, you know, let's come over like it's mid 90s again, you know, why not? Yeah, but whatever it is, just do whatever suits yourself. People talk about wetting a tea tile and putting it over there. They're a fan, keeping some ice on hand. Really important to stay hydrated, obviously. And it forgets really hot. There's no shame in having an app at the hottest time. I'm glad you've said it. That's what people do in hot countries. They have a yes to an app at the hot time, and then they come out at night when it's cooler. The core thing here is that we in this country are not used to thinking of ourselves as living in a hot country. It always comes as a massive surprise to us. We need to get used to it and to say, okay, we need to adopt these habits, these traditions that people have evolved over millennia in other countries, and that can help us. Well, according to a new report from the Climate Change Committee, the CCC, as you say, we can expect this in the UK and in Europe to become our new normal. Fiona, can you tell me about the reports other key findings? Well, this was a massive report, and it's been several years in the Meir King. And it's a warning short to the government, really. It's to say, look, none of the plans that have been brought forward for adapting the UK to the impacts of the climate crisis are adequate. They said very clearly, none of the plans have fit for purpose. What are those plans at the moment? It's been more about telling people to expect higher temperatures than it's been about telling them what to do. And a lot of it has been about flooding, because you forget about this in a heatwave, but one of the big impacts of the climate crisis is that we get wetter weather in shorter bursts. So a lot of what the UK has done to date has been about flood prevention, flood risk, building seawalls, concrete barriers around rivers, also trying to do some natural flood prevention, like trying to re-wet some peatlands, some wetlands. Some of them have been very effective, but they require a huge amount of investment, and not all of that investment has been made. But there are other areas where we are really behind. Drought planning, for instance, the opposite side of the coin has been neglected. We need places to store water. We haven't built a new reservoir in this country for 30 years. And yet the population has increased in that time, and the demands for water and our rainfall patterns have changed. So we need these new reservoirs, and we need ways of moving water to where people need it. And this is what the report's recommending. The report is very clear about that. The report is also saying a lot about farming, because obviously farmers are extremely affected by all of this, by both drought and flood and by higher temperatures, which affect the yields of many plants. And they need to start adapting. It's hard for them to do that, because a lot of farmers are very stretched. And it's so unpredictable, right? Yeah, it's making the farming year completely different to today's farmers, than it would have been for their grandfather's or even for their parents, you know, farming. So we need to look at our food production and how we maintain that. At the moment, you know, we get about 60% of our food from the UK. And the Committee on Climate Change is very clear that we need to maintain that. Because, of course, we don't exist in a vacuum. You know, this heat wave is all over Europe. There have been heat waves in the US. We're seeing massive heat waves in India and various other countries. And what we're seeing this year could get a lot worse. This issue used to be just regarded as weather. You know, it's of interest, you know, do I need my broadly today or, you know, National obsession. Exactly. But it's much more than that. It goes much deeper. And no, what we're seeing is the climate being seen as a national security issue. Because if you're in a country that you turn on the taps one day and nothing comes out, then that's a really serious issue for everyone. It's a business and economic, a health issue. It's a political issue, national security issue. It encompasses everything. Fiona, can we focus on the heat aspect for a moment? Because your right up of this report was so stark. I was actually reading it out loud by partner in which you know, nine out of ten homes in the UK will overheat. We need to be installing aircon basically everywhere now. Quite a lot to process for a country that's always had a pretty mild climate. Now, according to that CCC report, it sounds like the UK, as you say, is way behind in terms of adapting to a hotter world. Why is that? We haven't taken it seriously enough in the past. We still have this mindset that we are a cold country. And for a lot of the year, we are. There's also a danger in this report. We could actually become a colder country as well as a hotter country. The system of currents and winds in the Atlantic. Usually people call it the Gulf Stream, which isn't quite accurate, but that's how people know it. And it brings warm weather to Europe generally in the winter. And makes our climate milder than it would otherwise be. That could be faltering and it could stop or reverse. And that would bring much, much colder winters to the UK. We would be seeing a lot of the country I spawned for huge suites of time every winter. Temperatures could drop to, you know, so -10 or -20 across a lot of the country in those kind of winters. And yet we could still get hot summers like this one. That's really, really hard to get your head run. If we look at the impact of heat waves, it seems like other countries did take lessons from earlier examples. We're thinking about the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed 70,000 people. Other countries in Europe took action, but the UK didn't really. Can you give me other examples of adaptation that could be made or examples where this work is being done and being done well? Trees can make five degrees of difference, which is huge, really. We need to be planting them all over the place, providing fine-tons and public access to water. You walk around to European City and southern Europe and Italy or whatever, and you will see fine-tons all over the place. You might have seen in some European cities you get these kind of misting machines. They kind of spray-out water in a fine mist, which is very, very cooling. You can have green roofs where you kind of grow plants on your lawn. roofs and that can be cooling, that can cool the city, or you can paint roofs white to reflect more of the sunlight back into space. So we have technology to do this and we have natural methods as well. We just need people to use them. This is quite simple, easier fixes. Why, why is it take up not really that? People haven't really needed them. There have been efforts to to do it. I think, you know, there are tree planting schemes and so on, but you need to follow through. It's not enough to just dump these trees off the back of a lorry. They need to be nurtured and looked after and that's expensive. Green areas are really important. There's a frightening number of people in this country who don't have access to any green areas. We saw that during the lockdowns, you know, where people were cooked up all day, every day and couldn't get access. We need to, when we are building new homes, new housing, build in green areas, you know, don't pave over every single surface. You know, when you pave over surfaces, it creates problems with flooding, you know, with the runoff, but it also, it creates more heat. Fiona, let's talk about buildings in the UK because they do play a big part in why if it's that we're melting. What's wrong with the way they've been built and why are they coping so badly in the heat? Well, a lot of them were built a long time ago. We had a different climate than. So a lot of our housing stock is just not built for this, but you can adapt it, but it's not just those older houses. A lot of the modern houses we've built have not been built very well. A lot of the flats that we allow our builders to build are tiny. And you know, and if you were in a very small flat, it can feel like a rabbit hutch. We have building regulations adapted to climate change, so that, you know, anything that's built now has to be fit really for hot temperatures. We have this new future home standard, which is coming in. A lot of that has focused on insulation for keeping homes warm, so that you use less energy to heat homes, but you've got to provide means of cooling homes as well. And actually that has been a bit of a blind spot in those regulations. There's one solution, which is probably going to become more popular, is heat pumps. Now, we're used to thinking of them as a replacement for gas boilers, but they can also be used, the opposite way around. They can be used to cool, cool rooms during hot weather. Insulating highs as well can help to keep heat out, but people have got to use it right. We've got to be taught in a sense how to use their own homes. It's not just homes, is it that potentially need this retrofitting with heat pumps and better insulation. It's also the places we work, shop and what have you? Well, if the government were to say that people can't be expected to walk in temperatures above a certain level, then that would mean that employers would have to ensure that all of their buildings were capable of being cooled to that kind of level. Workplaces have not taken this seriously because they haven't been regulated to do so. For instance, in Spain, the recommendation is that workers shouldn't work above 27 degrees here in the UK, where's the pressure for government to impose those new rules for working? I think the pressure is coming from unions at the moment and from workers themselves. And I think we will see that that pressure increasing because, you know, more and more, this will impact on productivity. Workplace efficiency. Yeah, when it starts affecting the bottom line companies will pay attention. Fiona, what were the short-term fixes recommended in the report and how easy are they to implement? The report notes that there are a lot of people in vulnerable situations who are particularly at risk and are not being looked after. And so the report demands that within 10 years we should have air conditioning in all hospitals and care homes because all people are really very much at risk here. And what about children and young people? They were also mentioned, right? Children and young people we will need to have air conditioning in schools as well. The committee has given the government a bit longer to do that. We will need to have air conditioning in schools by 2050. But that's quite a big thing to do. I mean refurbishing the UK schools is going to be a big operation really. But the school year, as it's currently constituted, is based on farming from centuries ago. That's where our school year came from. There's no reason why you couldn't change that. Why do we have people taking exams in June? For what you're saying, air conditioning is really, at the moment, at the heart of what could make things cooler and easier for us living here. But isn't there an uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of that? Because everything we've learned about living sustainably says that air con is bad. It requires huge amounts of energy and contributes to climate change. How does one square that? Yeah, it is. And global cooling air conditioning around the world produces more greenhouse gas emissions than many countries. It's a conundrum. It's clear that we will need air conditioning in a lot of homes. But you can mitigate the impacts of that by not having it at too low temperatures, by only using it when it's necessary. In this country, we're not likely to need air conditioning all the time. If we're telling people get air conditioning, we need to also be saying, well, don't turn it up too much. You don't need your home to be icy. Give them kind of operating temperatures within that. They've done that in France where they've said, actually, don't have air con, if it's below 26 degrees. And that seems to work. We need to prepare for the fact that we will need a lot more electricity. Once you've accepted that, all of our electricity needs to be low carbon and we need a lot more of it. Then it becomes a bit easier, really. But isn't there still a fundamental question of inequality here? In the same way that some people can't afford to heat their homes, some people won't be able to afford to cool them. There's a real danger here that the UK will become a much more unequal society as we become a hotter society. And that's for a lot of reasons. One is just just affording air conditioning, affording to adapt your house. Another is food. Food prices are going to go up as a result of this, because farmers are facing more insecurity. So we will be paying more for our food. Schools as well, the government wants all schools to have air conditioning, but not until 2050. If you're a private school, you're probably going to have air conditioning a lot sooner. So your pupils are probably going to be better looked after. There's lots of ways in which our unequal society today will become more unequal in future if we're not very careful. But given our struggling economy, you know, the current housing stock, the state of the schools, a government that is trying to scrimp and save, how could this practically be done, even if there was political will for it? Making electricity cheaper. Renewable energy is the way to do that. We've seen the consequences of fossil fuel wars. Twice night in the last five years, we've had fuel crises and inflationary crises, economic crises coming from fossil fuels. How many more of these crises do we need to see before we learn? You can't choke off the supply of wind or sun, and the UK is generating an awful lot more of its electricity from renewable sources now than it was. Going for green electricity has already brought on electricity prices. You haven't noticed that because the electricity prices are still hitched to the price of gas, which is a really silly way to operate now, and which the government should be changing and can change. But that's why people are seeing increases in electricity prices, even though they should be seeing falls from the amount of renewable energy we've got. When we saw that out, we will have cheaper electricity, and we should have more abundant electricity as we build out more wind farms and more solar panels. Coming up, in the hottest week in May we've ever seen, Enter Tony Blair and his call to abandon net zero. This week, Tony Blair, we entered the public imagination, made headlines with his grand standing essay on what the country needs, and one of the things he argues for is an enter aiming for net zero. What do you make of that and the current conversation around it? Well, Tony Blair obviously has his views, and he was a prime minister at a long time ago, now. He never really grasped the climate crisis when he was prime minister, and he doesn't appear to be grasping at night. Net zero is not some arbitrary target that a politician dreamt up. It comes from science. It comes from the world's leading climate scientists telling us what we need to do to avoid the worst ravages of climate breakdown. Now, if we have a breakdown in the climate, then our economy will be destroyed. You won't be talking about GDP. You won't be talking about inflation. You'll be talking about rat barbecues. And we need to avoid that at all costs and the way to avoid that, the only way to avoid that is by cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero. So suggesting that you can just kind of put that off, that's not really an urgent problem, is insane. This is not some kind of mad, far away future that a few scientists think might happen. We're seeing the planet change in front of our eyes. The other thing that Tony Blair doesn't take a pint off is that we're adding ourselves even more closely to gas. In this short term, doesn't make sense because we're in the midst of a global fossil fuel crisis, where fossil fuel prices are going through the roof. Now, Tony Blair, very close to many petriestates, they want us to remain hitched to oil. Other voices in Tony Blair's ears from Big Tech and they want these big data centers everywhere and they're worried that renewable energy can't be built fast enough for them to build them. So they are agitating for more gas and so on. Is that really where you want to put your children's future? Gambling on resource that is declining and that is killing us and that is causing massive problems that will cause our planet to become unlivable within your children's lifetimes? Is that really where you want to be? Fiona, do you think these heatwaves are helping people re-engage with this urgent need to slow the climate crisis? Do you think are they helping environmental campaigns or does that urgency seem to drop off as soon as the temperature goes down? I think that people are seeing heatwaves to such a degree that it is changing people's consciousness. A few years ago in London we saw temperatures go over 40 degrees for the first time and I think people find that quite a shock. I think people are very aware of the climate crisis to an extent that our politicians passed on present do not understand. From the discourse that our politicians have, you would have thought that it was a minority interest to care about the climate crisis. That's not true. The forum party keeps trying to tell us that people don't want net zero. Actually, two thirds of people in this country want us to meet our net zero targets and that's a pretty big majority in anybody's book. It's a problem that our politicians have and that our media has, rather than a problem that ordinary people in this country have. People are voting with their feet as well. People are putting their own solar panels on. People are buying electric cars. So the public in the UK is way ahead of most of our politicians on this. Please, please catch up. No better way to say it. Fiona, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. That was the Guardian's Environment Editor, Fiona Harvey. Do look up her analysis of that CCC report, follow her work and much more at thegardian.com where you can also read our coverage of that Tony Blair essay if you're so inclined. And that's it for today. This episode was presented by me, Nushinik Bal. It was produced by Angelica Jopson and Eleanor Biggs. Sound design is by Ross Burns and the executive producer as Sammy Kent. We'll be back this afternoon with the latest. This is the Guardian.