POLITICS

EU Commission Shows True Endurance: Sacrificing Lower Floor Comfort to Keep Europe’s Finest Minds Cool and Focused

While lesser institutions might have surrendered to short-term populist pressure and turned the AC back on for everyone, the European Commission made the hard call. In the middle of a brutal heatwave, it shut down cooling on floors 1-7 of the Berlaymont so the people who actually run the show could keep their heads clear.

vlgr June 27, 2026 Tento článok sme neprekladali. 17 čítaní 2 min čítania

#KLÍMA #ENERGIA #EÚ #EURÓPA

As record temperatures gripped Brussels and much of Europe this week, staff at the European Commission’s headquarters received a straightforward internal message on Friday afternoon.

The Berlaymont, the iconic 13-story building that houses the Commission President and roughly 3,000 staff, acted quickly.

President Ursula von der Leyen’s office is on the 13th floor.

Most Commissioners and their teams work on floors 8 and above.

The Commission had already issued earlier guidance advising employees to hydrate, avoid peak sun hours, and consider adjusted working times. The building itself has complex, zoned climate systems that apparently reached their limit under the extreme load.

At the same time, German public broadcaster ARD’s science format Quarks has been circulating a poster with the clear message:

Air conditioners: What cools us down, heats the Earth up

The poster explains that more air conditioning means more greenhouse gas emissions and calculates an additional +0.05 °C of global warming by 2050 if electricity continues to come largely from fossil fuels. The recommended solution for normal people: use shade and fans instead.

Let’s be adults about this.

Europe is not short of problems. It is, however, occasionally short of cool, focused, high-level thinking.

High-level thinking requires conditions in which the brain does not feel like it is slowly poaching inside its own skull.

By protecting the working environment of the people whose job it is to have the big ideas, the Commission has demonstrated rare institutional maturity. The lower floors contain many talented and dedicated colleagues. Their role is to turn those big ideas into reality and answer emails. A bit of character-building perspiration is a small price to pay for preserving the clarity of the minds that actually steer the ship.

This is not a bug in the European project.

This is a feature.

Frankly, it’s about time someone had the courage to say it out loud.