A few years back I interviewed an architect for my podcast. He spent an hour on something that should be obvious and somehow isn’t anymore, a building can heat and cool itself just by facing the right way.
I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
We build homes that ignore where the sun rises, block the wind, and wrap them in glass that lets the sun in all day with no way to let the heat back out. Then we spend fifty years paying to undo it. Air conditioning in summer and heating in winter have both become so normal we forgot they’re solving a problem the building created for itself.
That energy has to come from somewhere, coal, gas, nuclear. Nuclear seemed like the cleanest way to produce electricity until the heat started warming the rivers it depends on. In France, several plants had to cut output during heatwaves this year because the river water was too warm to cool the reactors properly. Grids buckle under demand spikes exactly when everyone switches their AC on at once. The machine we built to save us from bad design turns out to have its own limits too, and those limits are only going to show up more often as summers get worse.
None of this is abstract for the people paying for it. In Albi, a 36 year old named Pauline Paredes describes her own apartment as a kettle after weeks of 40 degree heat, and says flatly she has to be out of it before next summer. She’s one of hundreds of people a French outlet interviewed this year alone about heat pushing them out of the places they live.
A geographer in Lyon estimates around 100000 people already leave French cities every year for the outskirts and the countryside because of it, and expects that number to double as the heatwaves keep stacking up.
Winter runs the same script in reverse. More than five million French households live in fuel poverty, a third of the country couldn’t properly heat their home this past winter, and three out of four households are now rationing their heating just to keep the bill within reach. None of that is a footnote to a design conversation. It’s what happens when a building depends entirely on a machine, and the machine gets too expensive to run or the grid buckles at the exact moment everyone needs it most.
Passive solar design isn’t futuristic. It’s ancient. For most of human history people built with the climate instead of against it, thick walls, shaded courtyards, windows placed on purpose, trees that dropped their leaves right when you needed the sun back. None of that was decoration.
We gave that up the moment cheap energy got easier than good design.
The shift has a start date. In 1952 the United Nations Secretariat went up in Manhattan as the first tower wrapped entirely in glass and cooled entirely by machine, followed a few years later by Lever House a few blocks down. Neither building was designed around the sun. Both were designed to look like the future, and cheap postwar energy is the only reason either one got away with it. Every glass tower built since has copied that template. Offices cooled that way now run about 60% higher in carbon emissions than ones that use natural or mechanical ventilation properly. We didn’t inherit bad buildings. We inherited a look, and we’re still paying the electric bill for it.
Every architect knows where the sun rises and sets. Yet, somehow most buildings are still designed like it doesn’t matter. In the northern hemisphere, your longest wall generally wants to face south. That one decision decides how much free heat you get in winter and how easily you can block it in summer, before a single brick goes down.
In winter the sun sits low. It travels under the roof overhang and warms the floor and the walls, which quietly hold onto that heat all day. Six months later the same window behaves completely differently. The summer sun sits high, the same overhang blocks it, the room stays bright without turning into an oven. Nothing moved. Nothing plugged in. The only technology was geometry.
Get the geometry wrong and inefficient turns into dangerous. London’s 20 Fenchurch Street tower, nicknamed the Walkie Talkie, curves its south face inward like a satellite dish. In 2013 that curve did exactly what a concave mirror does, it focused the sun into a single point on the street below. The hot spot passed 90 degrees Celsius. It melted panels on a parked Jaguar, warped a bike saddle, and set a doormat on fire outside a barbershop. The developers ended up bolting a permanent sunshade onto the building afterward, aluminum fins running from the third floor to the thirty fourth, a fix that cost millions of pounds because nobody modeled where the sun would actually land before they built it.
Cooling didn’t start with a compressor. It started with a window across from another window. Cross ventilation works on one idea, put openings on opposite sides of a space so air has somewhere to go. Wind comes in one side, pushes the stale heat out the other, and the building breathes on its own.
Older buildings understood this without needing to be told. Doors lined up with courtyards. Vents sat high to let hot air escape. Floor plans stayed narrow so every room caught moving air. A lot of modern apartments do the opposite, one glass wall and nowhere for heat to go. So we swap airflow for machinery and act surprised when cities burn through electricity every summer.
Thermal mass sounds technical. It’s actually closer to cooking. A cast iron pan stays hot long after it leaves the stove because it holds heat. Stone, brick, and concrete do the same job inside a building, soaking up warmth slowly, holding onto it for hours, letting it go once the temperature drops.
That’s why old stone houses stay cool through a scorching afternoon. The walls delay the heat instead of handing it straight to the room, then let it go outward once night air drops below the temperature of the stone, which is also why throwing every window open after dark was never superstition, just the last step of the same system.
A light building reacts to the weather. A heavy one negotiates with it. The difference is a few degrees you never had to pay for.
Somewhere along the way we split architecture from the landscape around it. That was the mistake. A mature deciduous tree, the kind that drops its leaves every winter, is one of the oldest climate technologies we have. In summer its leaves catch the sun before it reaches your roof. In winter those same leaves drop and let the light back in, right when you need it.
Compare that to a parking lot, which soaks up heat all day and radiates it back into the block long after dark. Trees do the opposite, they cool the air around them while they’re at it. During a heatwave, tree canopy runs eight to twelve degrees Celsius cooler than bare pavement, and a shaded sidewalk can feel up to 14 degrees cooler than one with nothing overhead. We keep shopping for smarter cooling systems while we cut down the oldest and most efficient ones.
None of this needs a backyard. A fifteen story block can face the right way and breathe on two sides just as easily as a bungalow, because the physics doesn’t care how many units are stacked on it. Sprawl is the real opposite of passive design, not density. Sprawl is what happens when a city spreads instead of stacks, and it only survives on a car in the driveway and a compressor on the wall.
People ask if insulation is the most important feature of an efficient building. Insulation matters, but it comes after the fundamentals. A well designed passive building stacks orientation, shading, ventilation, thermal mass, and insulation into one system where each part is quietly doing the others’ job too. Orientation catches the winter light. Overhangs block the summer sun. Trees add seasonal shade. Windows catch the wind. Walls bank the day’s heat. Insulation keeps all of it from leaking back out. None of this is new. It’s just been sitting there unused for about a century.
Climate change keeps exposing how badly we build. Our answer is always the same, a bigger unit, a stronger system, more electricity. We rarely ask if the building was ever designed with any of this in mind to begin with. Passive design offers something else, comfort you get from understanding a place instead of comfort you buy every month. Latitude, wind, trees, sunlight, seasons.
A building shouldn’t have to fight the place it’s standing in every single day, and for most of human history none of them did. Architecture was an extension of the land before it became a product line.
Pauline Paredes shouldn’t have to leave Albi to stop living in a kettle. The five million households rationing their own heat this winter shouldn’t have to choose between warmth and food. None of that is the weather’s fault alone. It’s the bill for a hundred years of buildings that were never asked to do their share of the work.
The most sustainable energy was never going to be the one we invent next. It was always the one we stopped needing the day we designed the building right the first time. We just built our way out of remembering that, one glass tower at a time.
Schools are closing or changing schedules. Trains are slowing down. Workers are being told to adapt. Older people are urged to stay indoors. Animals are dying in barns. Rivers are warming. Nuclear power stations are struggling to cool their reactors and being closed down. Farmers are watching the sky, hoping for rain that never comes. Cities are discovering, once again, that concrete, asphalt and glass are not neutral materials. They trap heat.
Every heatwave ends the same way.
“We need to adapt.”
Of course we do. Nobody serious argues otherwise. When temperatures reach 40°C, we need shade, cool public spaces, drinking fountains, schools that do not become ovens, hospitals that can keep functioning and cooling in strategic public buildings, especially for older people, children, sick people, outdoor workers and anyone trapped in poorly designed housing.
But adaptation cannot become the polite word for surrender.
The real question is not how we survive longer heatwaves.
The real question is why we continue to organize society in ways that make them worse.
Unfortunately, that’s the conversation many people would rather avoid.
The climate crisis is not a natural disaster in the way an earthquake is. Scientists warned us for decades. Communities raised the alarm. The solutions have been available for years. Yet, governments protected fossil fuel interests. Oil and gas companies expanded production. Executives collected billions. Politicians delayed, negotiated, softened regulations, greenwashed and lied.
This was not inevitable.
It was a political and economic choice.
Now, the same system that chose fire is trying to sell us fans, bottled water, air conditioners, climate insurance, private pools, green capitalism and survival kits.
The house is burning, and someone has opened a shop in the living room.
Heat Is Only the Symptom
The mistake is thinking this is only about high temperatures.
A heatwave is a stress test for almost everything that keeps society running.
It pushes the human body beyond its limits. It kills directly, especially when nights remain hot and people cannot recover. It damages sleep, concentration, heart health and kidney function. It turns classrooms into places where children struggle to learn and workplaces into places where people struggle to work.
It pushes infrastructure to its limits. Railway tracks expand. Roads soften. Electricity grids strain under rising demand. Hospitals become overloaded.
The irony is that ACs draw more power precisely when energy systems are already under pressure. Nuclear plants need cool water, yet rivers become warmer and shallower. The same heat that increases electricity demand can make electricity harder to produce.
It pushes agriculture as well. Cows produce less milk. Chickens die in industrial sheds. Crops dry out and/or suffer damage that only becomes visible weeks or months later. Soil loses moisture. Water restrictions arrive. Harvests shrink. Food prices rise.
Then everyone acts surprised that groceries become more expensive.
The damage does not end when the thermometer falls.
That’s why surviving the next heatwave is not enough.
The Food System Nobody Wants to Discuss
Climate conversations usually focus on transport.
And transport matters. Flying less matters. Driving less whenever possible matters. The World Cup spread across North America is a perfect example of climate absurdity, an event marketed as global unity while sending teams, fans, journalists and sponsors across an entire continent for entertainment.
But another major part of the crisis rarely receives the same attention because it sits on our plates.
Animal agriculture is one of the least efficient uses of land, water, energy and living ecosystems on Earth.
Livestock occupies roughly three quarters to more than four fifths of global agricultural land, depending on how it is measured, once grazing land and crops grown for animal feed are included. Yet, animal products provide only a minority of the world’s calories and protein. One widely cited Science study found that meat, dairy, eggs and aquaculture use about 83% of farmland while supplying just 18% of calories and 37% of protein.
Read that again.
Most of the farmland.
A fraction of the food.
That is not efficiency.
It is ideology disguised as agriculture.
The system produces far more than meat, milk and eggs. It produces methane, deforestation, polluted rivers, antibiotic resistance, dead zones in coastal waters and immense pressure on land and water.
It also produces immense suffering.
During heatwaves, pigs, chickens and cows cannot simply adapt because consumers expect cheap animal products. Ventilation systems fail. Cooling systems are inadequate or absent. Transport trucks become ovens. Poultry dies by the hundreds of thousands. Dairy cows suffer severe heat stress and milk production falls.
Then the industry presents itself as another victim of climate change while helping drive the crisis in the first place.
This is not about blaming someone trying to feed their family on a tight budget.
The ocean may be the most neglected part of the climate conversation.
We rightly describe forests as the lungs of the planet. They deserve that attention. But the ocean is far more essential to life on Earth. It has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. It takes in a large share of the carbon dioxide we emit. It produces roughly half of the oxygen we breathe, largely through microscopic phytoplankton.
The ocean is not scenery.
It’s not a backdrop for holidays.
It is one of the reasons this planet is still habitable.
There is something profoundly irrational about destroying marine ecosystems while wondering why the planet keeps overheating.
Industrial fishing is not simply the act of catching fish. It tears apart ecosystems. It removes key species from food webs, kills countless non-target animals and drags heavy nets across the seabed, destroying habitats that took decades, centuries or even millennia to develop.
Yet this rarely appears in mainstream climate debates.
We are told to fly less, and rightly so.
We are told to drive less, and rightly so.
We are only beginning to hear serious discussion about livestock.
But fishing is still treated as though fish simply appear on supermarket shelves and the ocean can absorb endless extraction without consequence.
It cannot.
If the ocean regulates climate, absorbs carbon dioxide, produces oxygen and stores enormous amounts of heat, protecting marine ecosystems is climate policy.
Eating less fish, or choosing not to eat it at all, is not only an ethical position. It is a climate position.
For those who continue to eat seafood, there is at least an important distinction to make between small-scale fisheries and industrial fleets that empty entire ecosystems.
The ocean is one of Earth’s greatest cooling systems. Protect it at all costs.
Why Air Conditioning Can’t Be the Plan
Air conditioning has an important role.
During extreme heat, it saves lives. Hospitals, schools, care homes, public libraries, emergency shelters and social housing all need effective cooling strategies. No one should die inside an apartment built for a climate that no longer exists.
But air conditioning can’t become our primary response.
Every unit cools an indoor space by releasing heat outdoors. Across an entire city, that extra heat makes streets even hotter, particularly after sunset. Air conditioners also increase electricity demand during the hottest periods of the year. Where electricity still depends on fossil fuels, emissions rise. Even cleaner grids face greater strain as peak demand grows.
Singapore illustrates both the benefits and the limits of this approach.
The city has become highly dependent on cooling. Buildings require constant air conditioning. Those systems release heat into the streets. Outdoor spaces become less comfortable, encouraging people to remain indoors, which increases demand for cooling still further.
The cycle reinforces itself.
That’s not resilience, it’s technological dependence.
We don’t need cities filled with cooled rooms.
We need cities that stay cool in the first place.
We Forgot How to Build for Nature
The most effective cooling technology has existed for millions of years.
Trees.
Not decorative saplings planted in tiny squares of concrete, but mature urban forests and healthy green canopies.
Anyone who has walked barefoot from hot pavement onto shaded grass already understands this without reading a scientific paper.
So why, every time France approaches 40°C, do we talk about buying more air conditioners before planting more trees?
Why do we pave over soil, remove mature trees, expand shopping centres, build vast parking lots and approve developments that trap heat, only to claim that more machines are the answer?
They store water, protect biodiversity, stabilise soils, reduce erosion, create humidity and lower temperatures. They make landscapes more resilient long before a heatwave arrives.
Yet even forests are increasingly treated as another industrial resource.
Living ecosystems become timber reserves. Old-growth forests become biomass. Trees are cut down, burned for energy and labelled renewable, while complex ecosystems that took centuries to develop are reduced to units of production.
The same logic appears again and again.
If something can be extracted, it is.
If something can be sold, it is.
The living world is valued less for keeping us alive than for generating another stream of profit.
Water Is Becoming Political
Water is becoming one of the defining political issues of this century.
Yet we still manage it as though nothing has changed.
During droughts, ordinary people are told to take shorter showers. Farmers are asked to reduce irrigation. Small growers are criticised for watering their crops.
Meanwhile, luxury uses fight for exemptions.
Golf courses have become symbols of this contradiction because they expose the politics behind water allocation. While vegetables struggle and ecosystems dry out, perfectly green fairways are often defended. Leisure for the comfortable can receive more protection than food production or ecosystem survival.
Mega-basins reveal the same mindset.
On paper, the idea sounds simple. Capture water in winter and use it during summer.
Reality is more complicated.
Many of these reservoirs are open to the air, increasing evaporation as temperatures rise. They can concentrate control of water in the hands of a limited number of large farms. They often allow water-intensive agricultural models to continue instead of encouraging the transition toward crops and farming systems adapted to the climate that is already arriving.
The question is not whether storing water can ever make sense.
The question is who controls it, who benefits from it and whether it helps transform agriculture or merely postpones change.
A society preparing for the future would treat every drop of freshwater as precious.
Rainwater would be collected wherever possible.
Wastewater would be safely reused.
Leaking infrastructure would be repaired.
Soils would be restored so they can retain moisture.
Cities would remove unnecessary concrete and allow water to return to the ground.
Farmers would receive support to transition toward more resilient practices.
Luxury water use would never be treated as equivalent to drinking water, food production or healthy ecosystems.
The Logic Behind the Crisis
The deeper problem is that our economic system rarely asks what keeps life alive.
It asks what can be sold.
That’s why so many climate conversations end in absurdity.
We’re told to separate our recycling while billionaires fly private jets.
We’re reminded to save water while enormous data centres consume vast amounts of electricity and freshwater to cool servers powering artificial intelligence, advertising and endless digital consumption.
We debate plastic straws while militaries burn enormous quantities of fuel, flatten cities, destroy farms, poison soil and create another wave of emissions through reconstruction.
The priorities are impossible to ignore once you see them.
The Climate Cost of War
War remains one of the largest blind spots in climate politics.
The climate impact of the war on Gaza has been estimated in the tens of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent once direct military activity and reconstruction are included.
The opening weeks of the US-Israel war on Iran were estimated to produce several million tonnes of emissions.
Lebanon has accused Israel of ecocide following the destruction of forests, farmland and ecosystems in the south.
Yet military emissions are still treated as though they exist outside the atmosphere.
As though bombs leave no carbon footprint.
As though fighter jets fly on moral complexity.
As though hospitals, schools, roads, farms and homes rebuild themselves without steel, cement, machinery and energy.
We can’t keep pretending these emissions don’t count simply because they’re politically inconvenient.
The pattern is difficult to ignore.
Capitalism drives extraction.
Extraction fuels empire.
Empire produces war.
War destroys societies.
Destruction demands reconstruction.
Reconstruction creates more emissions.
Then we’re told that buying a bamboo toothbrush is the meaningful response.
It is not.
Personal Responsibility Matters, but It Is Not Equal
None of this means personal choices are meaningless.
They matter because they reduce demand for destructive industries, help shift culture and make political demands more credible.
But responsibility is not shared equally.
A working family struggling to pay rent is not comparable to a billionaire with private aircraft, multiple homes, yachts and investments in fossil fuels.
Someone eating the foods they were encouraged to consume from childhood is not comparable to multinational agribusinesses lobbying to protect industrial livestock.
A commuter driving because public transport is inadequate is not comparable to governments that refuse to invest in reliable trains, cycling infrastructure and walkable cities.
The message can’t be that ordinary people are the problem.
The message is that we live inside a system designed to make destructive choices easy, profitable and normal while making better choices more expensive, less accessible or socially unusual.
Recognising that distinction is not about avoiding responsibility.
It is the first step toward directing responsibility where it belongs.
What We Can Do
None of this means waiting for someone else to act.
Some of the simplest changes are still among the most effective.
Eat less meat, or stop eating it.
Eat less fish, or stop eating it. If you choose to keep eating fish, understand the difference between small-scale fisheries and industrial fleets that empty entire ecosystems.
Buy fewer clothes. Buy second hand. Repair what you own. Stop treating fashion as a weekly identity update.
Do the same with appliances. Borrow, share, repair and buy used whenever possible.
Build a culture where tools, equipment, transport and household goods are shared instead of endlessly duplicated.
Fly less.
Drive less whenever practical.
Support political parties and movements that take climate change, biodiversity, animal welfare, water management, public services and peace seriously. Voting alone will not solve the crisis, but electing governments that deny climate science, protect fossil fuel interests and normalise war will accelerate it.
Above all, reject fake solutions.
A city with air conditioning but no trees is not prepared.
A country with mega-basins but dying soils is not prepared.
A food system built on industrial animal suffering is not prepared.
A sporting culture that flies millions of people across continents for profit is not prepared.
A digital economy that consumes ever more electricity and water in pursuit of endless growth is not prepared.
A world that treats war as ordinary is not prepared.
France is not ready for what’s coming, and that pains me.
Europe and America aren’t ready either.
The Crisis Behind the Crisis
The tragedy is that even by the narrow standards of economic growth, this system is failing.
Heat kills workers.
It reduces productivity.
It damages harvests.
It weakens infrastructure.
It raises healthcare costs.
It disrupts schools.
It destabilises insurance.
It pushes food prices higher.
It forces governments to spend billions (of our money) responding to disasters they chose not to prevent.
Even someone who cares nothing for animals, forests, rivers, oceans or social justice should recognise one simple reality.
This model is becoming too expensive to sustain itself.
The climate crisis is not only an ecological crisis.
It is a crisis of imagination.
We keep trying to preserve the lifestyle that created the emergency, then call that realism.
But there is nothing realistic about filling unliveable cities with more air conditioners while cutting down trees.
There is nothing realistic about building reservoirs while refusing to transform agriculture.
There is nothing realistic about defending industrial livestock, industrial fishing, fossil fuels, permanent war and luxury consumption while asking ordinary people to adapt.
Realism begins by accepting that an economy built on endless extraction can’t produce a liveable planet.
We don’t need a parasasol over the apocalypse.
We need accountability.
We need to recognise that climate is not a separate issue. It runs through everything.
Our cities.
Our countryside.
Our food.
Our transport.
Our water.
Our forests.
Our oceans.
Our economies.
Our wars.
Not because that sounds radical.
Because the moderate path has become the one driving the crisis.
The planet is not burning because we failed to understand what was happening.
It’s burning because those with the power to change course chose not to.
That choice can still be reversed.
But only if we stop confusing adaptation with acceptance and start confronting the system that keeps choosing fire.
Teekay Rezeau-Merah 