Kicker: Climate uncontrolled

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Britain has discovered there’s only one thing hotter than a debate over climate change:

A British building without air conditioning.

Organizers canceled a London Climate Action event titled "Extreme Heat: Improving Governance and Improving Action Around the World."

The reason? Just one.

It was simply too hot.

A record heat wave sent temperatures at the meeting site to nearly 97 degrees

... utterly intolerable if you can't control the temperature in the room.

And in the stuffy old library at the London School of Economics—where you'd think they understood tradeoffs—they offer no air conditioning at any price.

But that's fairly typical in Britain, where fewer than one in five homes has A/C.

One opposition politician calls this hot mess ...

“… a miserabilist net zero mindset.”

Climate action? Absolutely!

Turn on the air.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.