Europe Is Burning

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This summer, Wildfires have been raging across Europe, with France and Spain, particularly heart-hit. More than 360,000 residents and tourists have now been evacuated. It feels like we're in a war zone. The words of one woman living near Bordeaux is phased, get ever closer. Hundreds of thousands of acres and scenerated, villages destroyed, and entire communities upended by the fires. Police come and start screaming at the neighborhood.

“Like, you have to get out, get out, you have to in a minute. Is that quick?”

Today, I talked to my college Chico Harlan and Mark Lamler about why this fire season has been especially devastating for Europe. And how, when it comes to climate change, the content is grappling with just how much it may need to adapt. It's Thursday, July 30th. Chico, welcome to the daily. Thank you so much for having me.

Of course, this is your first time on the show. It is.

Well, I am glad to have you here. You're the global climate correspondent at the New York Times, and you're based in Europe. So help us make sense of these fires that are sweeping across France and Spain. What's your understanding of how both these countries get fires this big and destructive at the same time? Well, you're right. These fires are simultaneously unfolding as the largest ever in France and the largest in Spain. They're both unfolding on the outskirts of

major cities, Madrid and Bordeaux, and there have been large scale evacuations. And in order to really understand how you get two fires that are both historic, kind of have to go back all the way to May when it wasn't even summer yet.

Europe is bracing for its first major heat event of 2026. That was the first time that Western

Europe was hit by a heat wave. And it is punishingly hold. People are scurrying for shade. I'm taking a shower up for bed. I'm sleeping with wet towels over me just to try to survive

“honestly and just try to sleep. And then came the big one just a month later in late June.”

The Eiffel Tower closed early due to safety concerns, temperatures, parts of France hitting 111 degrees. And if you just look at France for a second in the span of three days, they set the hottest day in national history back to back to back to back. No, even if you're not. These are unprecedented times, set the French president. And if that had just been a three-day thing, that alone would have been remarkable. But the

unusually hot temperatures stayed. And then they let up for a few days and then they came roaring back through July. This morning, the death toll keeps climbing due to the brutal heat wave gripping Western Europe. It was very lethal. A public institute in Spain says there were more than a thousand excess heat related deaths this June. Some estimates say 10,000 extra deaths because of heat. Some have said 20,000, but what you can say for sure is that this was a

highly deadly event across Western Europe. Wow, okay. So you're saying tens of thousands of people are dying in these heat waves. In the U.S., we often see a couple thousand people die annually.

“And that's awful. But what you're describing is striking here. Why is this toll so big?”

There's a couple of reasons for that. One is Europe has buildings that are older and that we're not built for this climate. They're built for colder temperatures. And they were built to

retain heat. In Paris, these famous beautiful homes, apartments, are under zinc roofs, which basically

are like ovens. Then, of course, there's the air conditioning factor, which is a big one. Still, a minority of Europeans have air conditioning. And then during heat waves, people who can will scramble for anything during a daytime, they'll go to a mall, they'll jump in a pool. But people who are elderly or have pre-existing conditions can be stuck

their bodies break down. And that's how these deaths happen. God. So people are literally

baking right now. And it's because of a lack of air conditioning and the architecture of buildings. I'm going to ask, and I understand this, the most American question. But I do think it's a question that's on the minds of many listeners. Why not use more air conditioning? I get there are environmental concerns. But explain this to me. This situation seems dire. Well, it just requires money and time. And in some cases, the design of the buildings presents a

problem for installing air conditioning. There's also widespread in France, especially a philosophical

“opposition to air conditioning. But you have to remember that the idea was, look, this intense”

discomfort is a couple nights a year. Like we can deal with it when it gets bad. The rest of the year, there's no need for air conditioning. What's happened this summer is that these periods of discomfort and now deadly discomfort are lasting for weeks, not just a couple days and go away. Okay. So I just want to zoom out. Why is it so much hotter? Obviously climate change. I assume it's a big part of this answer. But just explain what is making this heat wave so acute in these

particular areas. Climate change is the global answer. But there is a more Europe-specific answer too, which is how climate change is playing out there. A big part of the reason that Europe is warming faster is because of proximity to the Arctic. The Arctic is the fastest warming part of the whole planet.

And why is that? It's because this place that had snow cover and ice basically was like a white

reflecting sheet. And that whiteness is now being lost and gradually turning into more darker surfaces, dark waters, places where there's no longer ice or snow. And now we're as the sun used to bounce back up. Now that radiation heat is being absorbed into the waters. You can think of it like a t-shirt on a hot day. We wear a white t-shirt, it bounces back the heat. You wear a black t-shirt? You're extremely hot. Yes. Right. Right now, the Arctic is that black

t-shirt. And that is causing these ripple effects. What it adds up to is that Europe has been warming by about 0.5 Celsius, which is almost a degree Fahrenheit per decade. That doesn't sound like a big number, but you spread that out and aggregated over a couple decades. And all of a sudden

you have a climate that feels different than even what you remember 20 years ago.

“Okay. So let's talk about these fires. We've got this intent heat. Is it as simple as that?”

It's a lot hotter, so things will burn more easily. It is pretty straightforward. And that's especially true when heat lasts for a long time. There's a big difference between a one-day spike and a spike that goes on for weeks. And there are other factors that play too that are a little bit more in the background. I mean, one is just depopulation of rural areas. More intensification of agriculture, but smaller plots of farmland that are being used. And so more of Europe is being

overtaken by forest. And that is definitely what happened in this part of southwestern France. That area that's burning used to be swampland. And in the 19th century, the government planted pine forests there. And these monoculture forests, as they're called, often burn more easily, than ones that are mixed. This is the kind of decision that's not so consequential when France has the climate that it had historically. But you combine that with what's changing because of

climate change. And all of a sudden, having pine forests becomes a huge liability. Okay. So they planted a bunch of trees. And in the process, it seems like they inadvertently

“created a Tinder box. That's right. And I think the conclusion that you get from that and from”

so much else that you're seeing here is that Europe simply had built itself up in the natural world and in the physical world for an environment that no longer exists. You just think about the cities alone and the consequences and problems that can come from thinking about how do we make the cities more livable during periods of intense heat. And indeed, like Paris has been a pretty good example of a place that has gone all in on trying to better equip itself by cutting the

number of vehicles in the city, by expanding green space. All these things have essentially made Paris the best in class example in Europe. And yet these heat waves are still extremely deadly. So this is where you start to see these compounding challenges add up. And the bigger point is that this is a global problem and Europe is at the mercy of the bigger emitting countries, China, India, the United States, not to mention fast growing developing

countries where there's huge energy demands and those demands will continue to be growing. So these are the places that are going to be determining the trajectory for the world with their decisions, how much solar, how much coal. These are really complicated questions and

So that's not a question where Europe has the primacy to make a determination and it is the definition

of a global issue.

“Well, Chico, thanks for explaining how we got here. Appreciate you. Happy to do it. Thanks.”

After the break, I talked to my colleague Mark Lamler, who was on the ground in France about how the country is reckoning with the toll of these disasters. It enriches our relationship. It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff, we're making the same food, we're on the same page. Learn more about giving a New York Times

subscription as a gift at nytimes.com/gift.

Mark, my friend, I'm glad you're here. Great to be with you, Zolem. We just talked to Chico Harlan about how we got to the point of this record heat wave and subsequently these devastating wildfires. But you sir are bearing witness and I want you to tell me what you have seen.

“What does it look like from the ground in a place like Bordeaux?”

So I arrived in Bordeaux last Sunday at around 3.34 o'clock in the afternoon and that was a particularly bad day because the wind was blowing from the west to the east. So all the smoke from the fire was blowing directly over the city from a distance of about 20 miles away. So as the train pulled into the story beautiful old soaring station, there was a really apocalyptic scene, a sort of a deep yellow orange cloud that was sort of hanging over the entire city.

You couldn't see the sun. It really had blotted out the sun. The spires of the cathedral, which are a real landmark in Bordeaux, you could sort of barely pick them out in the distance. And then when the train pulled in and we all stepped off and

“and walked down the platform, you instantly smelled this kind of deep smokey smell in the air.”

And then as you walk out of the station and into the street, you actually began to see before your eyes these tiny pieces of ash floating in the air. And you instantly felt it in your throat, you felt it on your eyes. It was like walking into a sort of a very dystopian kind of landscape. And it's sort of very instantly brought home that this is an atmosphere in a city that was in a lot of distress. Okay, you're at the train station. You're going towards Bordeaux, but I'm imagining

most of the people that you're seeing, they're trying to get at a Bordeaux. They're trying to flee the area, right? There were a lot of people in the station making plans to leave the city. Michael was to get as quickly as I could to one of these huge evacuation centers that had been set up around the city to accommodate people who've been forced to flee their houses.

So that was my first sort of destination as I began reporting the story.

Okay, so you're at the evacuation center. Tell me about the stories you heard while you were there. First of all, just to set the scene, you walk into this enormous airplane hanger-sized room where there are hundreds and hundreds of cuts and rows. And people either lying on the cuts, sitting on the cuts. Some of them are playing cards. A lot of them are sitting in groups. So I sort of walked around. I brought a new system from our bureau and the two of us began

talking to people. The first two people that we encountered were a younger woman and an older woman. Both of whom had fled their apartments in the middle of the night. They'd been roused it almost literally out of bed by the police knocking on their doors, telling them they had to leave now. They knew the previous evening that things were getting dire. One of them told me that she stood on the balcony of her fifth floor apartment and sort of could see the wall of flames

only of myel or so from her apartment. And so these women were really truly worried about what they would find when they got a chance to go home. Whether their apartments would still be intact. And so these were the kinds of stories and they were reflected really over and over and over again as you looked out across this cavernous room. There were a lot of people who were feeling

state of their houses, the things they left behind and how difficult it would be to pick up the

“pieces. This sounds devastating. I mean, the world is getting a glimpse of this devastation. We're”

seeing these scattered videos of people fleeing their homes. I've seen residents that are choosing to jump in and fight these fires and help fire fighters. But you're really painting a full picture of this. And so far, specifically with France, what's been burned in the path of these fires? What has

been ultimately destroyed? Just to give you a couple sort of headline numbers, we're talking about

over a hundred thousand acres of property. Many, many, many villages have been damaged. One village in particular, La Porge, which is west of Bordeaux, has suffered catastrophic damage with some hundred and fifty homes utterly destroyed. And something in excess of two hundred forty thousand people were forced to evacuate their homes. That makes this the largest piece-time evacuation in modern French history. And so we're really talking about a magnitude of natural disaster that may be

familiar to people in other countries. But in France, it is really truly something that no one has ever seen. So given that this is much bigger than past fires, do they have resources? Do they know

how to fight this thing? Are they fully equipped in this moment? Well, France has invested a fair

amount in firefighting capacity in part drawing on the experience of some of the bad fire seasons that they've had in the past. So yes, they do. They have a Canada planes that are capable of spraying fire retardant on the forest. They've also had some very large planes loan to them by some of their European neighbors. So there are a great deal of resources in the region. But it has to be said, despite all that power they're bringing to this, the fires continue to burn out of control.

So it's a pitched battle. They're bringing a lot to it. But it is far from under control yet. And we often see that there's real challenges when it comes to these responses to wildfires about

where to prioritize your resources, right? Have there been some of those points of tension when it

comes to this response? Well, yeah, there have. And the reasons for that are that the region around Bordeaux has a lot of different sort of elements to it. Okay. There is a peninsula out by the ocean. That's called the La Freya Peninsula. That is very popular with holiday makers and people have vacation homes out there. There are already some complaints from residents of this little town. I mentioned La Porche, which was so heavily damaged that they were sort of essentially left

to fend for themselves and that other areas, perhaps more economically advantage areas, had more protection. We haven't confirmed those reports yet. But those are the types of things that you're beginning to hear about. Then much closer to town, you have a series of very sensitive military installations where French companies, manufacture components and propellant for the nuclear

“missile arsenal of France. Wait, time out. I'm sorry. But we're talking about when I think a”

Bordeaux, I definitely think of the line industry. I think of tourism. You're saying that there's actually a nuclear facility in this area as well. That could be in the line of these wildfires. That seems terrifying. Yeah, I'm going to get to the vineyards. Don't worry about that. But yeah, there are in fact factories that make rocket fuel not far from Bordeaux and which lie in the path of these fires. So you can imagine that for the authorities, the top priority is preventing

the fires from getting close enough to these factories that it would raise a question about causing explosions. Because that would, of course, take this into a very, very different magnitude in terms of a civil emergency. Yeah, I would say so. Okay. So that's obviously a concern on its own. But let's go back to what you mentioned before. Let's get back to the line. We know this is

“something that's incredibly important to the local economy in this region. So tell me how the”

fires are impacting the line industry, the vineyards in this area. It's an interesting question and the answer might surprise you a little. None of the vineyards so far have been directly affected by fire. Really? And there are a number of reasons for that. Part of it is geographic. A lot of the wine industry in Bordeaux is actually on the east side of the river. And the wildfires are on the west side of the river. And indeed on the west side of the city of Bordeaux. Okay. So it's got a buffer

right now. There is a buffer. There is also a separate issue, which is that vineyards can often act

well-tended. The soil around them tends to be fairly dry. And as a result, they aren't a particularly

great accelerant for fires. So the long and short of it is, no vineyard has erupted in flames during the course of these wildfires. But that isn't the end of the problem for the wine industry. Because what has happened is that the vineyards, like the city itself, have been covered with this very dark smokey cloud. And the big question, and it's an unresolved one so far, is whether the smoke will hang over the vines long enough to permeate into the grapes themselves. And if it does do that,

will it leave this vintage when these grapes are harvested? Will it leave this vintage with a kind of

a smoky taste that could actually ruin the vintage where it's strong enough? I just want to clarify

of what you're describing actually happens. This isn't just like a blow to wine lovers. Like this would be a major economic blow to the region. No? Yes, it would. I mean, wine is one of the most important industries for Bordeaux. It's also the industry that has put Bordeaux on the map. Sure. And even before these fires, the wine growers were facing a confluence of problems. President Trump's tariffs on French wine and issue that you know well-zoleant. Of course, and not just the fires,

but successive summers of extreme heat, which have changed the harvest cycle. They've also changed the nature of the grapes in a way that makes it harder to produce the kind of finely

“balanced wine that Bordeaux is so famous for. So I think the people who live there recognize that”

the natural habitat that they live in is no longer well-suited to the kind of climate that they now face. This is just a much more hostile and unforgiving climate and one for which they're not particularly well-suited and one that will make it harder for them to make a living the way that they have for generations. What you're describing is a longer-term struggle. There might be those who are waking up and asking, what the heck is going on? How do we get here? But you're more so saying

there's been a series of steps over years that brought us to this point. And I know we're talking about Bordeaux right now, but I should note there's also fires in Spain, devastating fires. We're seeing this heat wave impact the European region more broadly. And then I guess the question is,

“is this a tipping point? Not just for Bordeaux, but for the country or even Europe in general?”

Well, as I'm sure Chico said earlier, Europe is in a particularly exposed position because it's warming faster than any other continent on the planet. And because it is not suited historically to these kinds of dry hot climates. I think that Europe is facing a moment where people are really saying to themselves, we can't keep living the way we have. It simply doesn't work in the world that we are now entering. And this comes at a time when, at a European level, there's quite a lot of

backsliding on the ambitious targets that Europe set for making its economies a net zero. That is taking out as much greenhouse gases as they are putting into the atmosphere. Climate policy has become controversial, particularly on the political right in France and other countries. And so even as the evidence grows ever more dramatic of the changes to climate and the impacts of those changes, the political will to really confront climate change head on is actually weakened somewhat.

And that's a real paradox. This is fascinating. I literally think of France as a leader in this area.

“Paris, climate accords, right? Why are we seeing this shift when it comes to the public?”

Well, there are a number of factors. The most important of which is the economy.

Economic growth has been sluggish in France and other European countries. There's also a great deal of energy and security as a result of the war in Ukraine. And more recently, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. And in that kind of anxious environment, having a very aggressive green policy net zero targets seems to many like a luxury that Europe can't afford right now. Right on one hand, you're describing a situation where economic anxiety is

trumping all. It's shaping the public's attitude towards some of these ambitious goals when it comes to the climate. On the other hand, this region is burning right now. And this would be the exact right time to recommit to some of these policies and goals. Well, indeed. And I think that

around a little bit. You saw that in Spain with the Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez who has declared

“what he calls a climate emergency. You know, I think you'll hear more voices like that in the”

coming days and weeks. But while this great debate plays out, people need solutions now. They can't wait for three, four years. They need to learn how to live with and cope with this heat in the short run. So what you're hearing a lot about in Europe these days is adaptation. How do you adapt cultures and countries and societies to hotter climates? And so clearly one of the easiest remedies is air conditioning. And that's not to say that there's no air conditioning in France. There's plenty

of air conditioning, particularly in the southern part of the country. But as a general principle,

France has moved more slowly and more reluctantly toward the widespread use of air conditioning particularly in homes. And I think what's happening now and you're seeing it play out politically culturally is also a kind of a reckoning, a recognition that perhaps the French are going to have to get over this. They're going to have to simply accept that widespread home air conditioning is going to be a reality in this country. Just as it is in large parts of Spain, just as it is

in Dubai, just as it is in the United States. And I think based on my own reporting that France

will get there, another couple of summers like this and it may get there sooner than we might expect.

I think that for the moment at least Europe is caught in a situation where it's going to be thinking much more short-term about how do you cope with the next month, two months. And then let's address that epic issue of can we get back to some really ambitious net zero targets. Well, Mark, I hope you stay safe and cool. Appreciate you. Thank you very much, Solomon. We'll be right back.

“Here's what else you need to know today. The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole”

reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up in his words, quote, "behind bars," unquote. Appearing before a Senate Committee on Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the government's response to the COVID pandemic, accused the committee's Republican leader, Senator Ram Paul of Kentucky, of being on a crusade against him and refused to answer any questions.

Therefore, although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the fifth amendment to the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions. Thank you. The decision to not testify marked the latest turn in a few between Dr. Fauci and Senator Paul, who has accused Fauci of lying to Congress, and allegation Fauci denies.

Over the weekend, Senator Paul released to the public Fauci's diary entries in which the doctor reflected on the origins of COVID and museed over his own thing. And during the hearing, and I rate Senator Paul kicked Fauci's attorney out of the hearing room. Look, this is the way Anthony Fauci wants to be remembered from a lawyer not listening to

“the rules. That's the way you want to be remembered, and that's what you're going to do.”

You are not recognized, sir. Security please remove him from the room. And the U.S. began a new wave of attacks on Iran and what the Trump administration described as retaliation for attempted attacks against U.S. forces. The barrage came hours after American and Saudi fighter jets attacked Iranian-linked militias in Iraq, while Iran fired missiles at military bases in Jordan, used by U.S. forces. The strikes ended at days long pause and fighting between

the United States and Iran and widened the scope of the war. Today's episode was produced by Lexi D.L., Jack Disadoro, Carlos Prieto, and Adrian Hurst.

and Mary and Lasana. Our theme music is by Wonderley. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

“That's it for The Daily. I'm Zollin Cano Youngs. See you tomorrow.”

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