PARIS — Is France ready for a crisis that plunges it into darkness? The French government is planning to find out.
The government is looking to organize a tabletop simulation of a sudden, nationwide power outage in the second half of 2027, according to four people with direct knowledge of the exercise, who were granted anonymity to discuss plans that have not been publicly announced.
The exercise will involve the French electricity grid operators Enedis and RTE as well as several government departments and ministries and the French military administration.
Its purpose will be to determine how the country would respond to a paralyzing electricity outage of the kind that hit Spain and Portugal in April 2025, or a major cyberattack targeting the power grid as Poland experienced last year — an act of sabotage Brussels has attributed to Russian intelligence services.
The simulation will test “the country’s ability to respond,” said one person familiar with preparations for the exercise, adding that it is intended to assess the time needed to restore power and the country’s ability to ensure the continuity of essential services.
The exercise was formally confirmed during an interministerial committee on national resilience on July 8. A detailed announcement should come before the end of the year.
The meeting notes outline other priorities, such as making sure the French state maintains access to goods considered “essential to ensuring the continuity of the state and the protection of the population.”
These include “emergency blankets, generators, medicines, telecommunications equipment, equipment for law enforcement, as well as rare and critical raw materials.”
Stress test
Crisis preparedness has turned into a political issue in France as record-breaking heat and wildfires are forcing the country to reckon with its ability to respond to emergencies.
Last summer, the government updated the country’s National Resilience Strategy, a roadmap on how to “maintain the functions essential to collective life” in the face of war or natural disasters.
Since the start of the summer, many French regions have faced unprecedented temperatures, with mercury levels setting multiple records in June.
In the country’s southwest, out-of-control wildfires fueled by extreme heat and drought forced mass evacuations that affected more than 200,000 people.
In Paris, the mayor made a desperate plea to large-scale food retailers to mobilize ice stocks over fears that first responders would run out of much-needed cubes to cool down victims of heatstroke.
Opposition parties were quick to attack the government over what they described as a widespread lack of preparedness, forcing the executive to defend itself.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu also announced that the government would submit a bill to parliament to improve emergency response systems.
“We want to refocus fire and rescue services on their core mission and adapt our organization to the crises that lie ahead,” said Lecornu Sunday in an interview with La Tribune Dimanche.
The moon has a brand new crater as of Wednesday, thanks to a rogue SpaceX rocket that crashed into Earth’s nearest neighbor at 5,400 miles an hour. Originally part of a 2025 mission to launch a pair of lunar landers for U.S. and Japanese companies, the rocket was supposed to fall back to Earth. Instead, it strayed off course and eventually reached its final resting place on the moon’s surface.
According to the Guardian, astronomers were unable to confirm the impact, “possibly because the impact site was close to the visible edges of the moon.” A day later, a Korean lunar orbiter captured images of the impact, but it will still take time to confirm the size of the crater, which is expected to be about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, for the record. In March 2022, a rocket slammed into the moon, creating a double crater about 95 feet wide. That object was later identified as part of China’s Long March 3C rocket, which propelled the Chang’e 5-T1 mission around the moon in 2014. In fact, there’s been trash on the moon ever since humans first landed there, which some scientists cite as evidence of the Anthropocene, a new geological era defined by how badly humans have messed up the planet and its nearby neighbors.
NEWS 🚨: A Korean lunar orbiter has photographed the crash site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage on the Moon pic.twitter.com/chI8hpWdsv
Indeed, it’s difficult to estimate how space junk is currently orbiting our planet. By one count, there are more than 17,000 metric tons of objects in Earth orbit, including nearly 19,000 satellites. Every time we shoot more stuff up into space, we risk it hitting something else, as in a giant game of billiards. That threatens to create a cataclysmic chain reaction, in which every collision creates more space debris and also risks damaging satellites and space stations we’d like to keep operational. This might make future space launches unsafe (such as the planned Artemis IV moon landing mission) and could render GPS devices completely useless. If you think Google Maps is glitchy now, just wait.
This hypothetical scenario is called Kessler Syndrome, but I propose renaming it Tesla Syndrome, given that Elon Musk’s Starlink has nearly 11,000 satellites in orbit, with eventual plans to launch as many as 42,000. Musk’s car is still floating out there somewhere, too. The statistical probability of a company owned by the world’s richest man making our space trash problem even worse is high, so we’d better keep crossing our fingers for more near misses — and, just maybe, a future in which humans behave less like slobs.
Its WeatherNext model, which will be open-sourced, can accurately predict a storm’s track and intensity using lower-resolution weather data. Researchers don’t yet fully understand how it does this.
LAS VEGAS — Weeks before they escaped a closed test and launched a cyberattack without any human prompting, some of OpenAI’s most advanced artificial intelligence agents secretly began sharing tips on how to cheat their way through an internal hacking evaluation, two of the AI company’s researchers said Wednesday.
“This is a pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole,” Michael Dalton, one of the AI-maker’s researchers, said during a presentation at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The latest disclosure provides greater detail on the timeline and methods used by two of OpenAI’s models before they slipped outside a controlled environment and onto the open internet, allowing the models to breach AI developer platform Hugging Face undetected. OpenAI admitted its models were responsible for the hack late last month, roughly a week after Hugging Face said an autonomous AI system broke into its network.
The revelation is likely to spur fresh scrutiny of the measures leading AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are taking to monitor the behavior of their most cyber-capable technology — especially during evaluations where agents are prompted to demonstrate their hacking skills in what is meant to be a controlled setting.
On Tuesday, the U.K.’s AI Safety and Security Institute disclosed that Anthropic’s most powerful AI model created fake online personas and sought to trick a human coder into abetting a cyberattack during a recent hacking test gone wrong. After the Hugging Face disclosure last month, Anthropic conducted a review and found models it was testing had breached three organizations in separate incidents dating back to April.
Dalton and Eric Wallace, another OpenAI researcher, said Wednesday the AI giant recently learned that multiple agents it was testing simultaneously began communicating over an internal message board in early May. There, different models shared advice about how to accomplish difficult hacking challenges they were struggling to surmount, including workarounds that required internet access.
Two OpenAI models ultimately strung together a series of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the internet and worm their way inside Hugging Face in mid-July. OpenAI has said the models were focused on completing a hacking evaluation they were prompted to solve, and that correct answers could be found on the AI developer platform.
The OpenAI researchers told conference attendees that since early May, the models created a message board inside OpenAI’s Artifactory internal file system. Without the company’s knowledge, the models spent months independently exchanging information and techniques to help each other complete difficult tasks.
Wallace said that when models get stuck, they often “try to game or cheat the task in order to get their reward.”
“The beginning of this incident kind of traces back to this point where one agent realized it could communicate by uploading a note,” he added.
By late May, one model found a way to abuse Artifactory’s internet access to retrieve files from various websites — effectively giving the models indirect access to the internet. In June, the models were able to find and exploit a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability to gain administrative privileges on Artifactory, install remote software and expand their activity within the system.
These efforts eventually overloaded Artifactory, causing a system-wide outage in early July that alerted OpenAI’s engineers to the ploy. After investigating, the company revoked the model’s credentials, removed the message board and worked with Artifactory to fix any gaps before resuming training. But the models found another way to communicate inside Artifactory just days later and continued exchanging techniques to target additional vulnerabilities within OpenAI’s infrastructure and external systems, including Hugging Face.
In light of the incident, Dalton said OpenAI is “consciously slowing down research to enhance security and to upgrade the security principles and foundation of our environment, and dramatically scaling up the monitoring of our AI agents and improving our general security control environment across prevention, detection, and mitigation.”
Why people want a job at the European Commission — and why so many end up miserable
The Commission is one of Brussels’ most coveted employers. Inside, officials describe mounting pressure, bureaucracy and burnout.
By SEBASTIAN STARCEVIC in Brussels
Illustrations by Natália Delgado/POLITICO
Hundreds of thousands of Europeans dream of landing one of the European Commission’s coveted civil service jobs, with around 170,000 people applying for just 1,500 entry-level positions at the EU institutions earlier this year.
Yet for many who make it inside the EU executive, the reality falls well short of the dream.
POLITICO spoke to a dozen officials from different commissioners’ cabinets and Directorates-General, varying in age, nationality and seniority, who described an institution where long hours, cumbersome bureaucracy and, in some cases, toxic management have left them exhausted, alienated and questioning whether the money and prestige are worth it.
Their experiences varied widely across the Commission’s 30,000-strong workforce — but the same complaints surfaced again and again. Some were granted anonymity to speak frankly about their workplace experiences.
“The conditions are more and more difficult,” said Nicolas Mavraganis, president of Union Syndicale Fédérale, an umbrella group linking roughly 20 staff unions across EU and international bodies. A Commission official since 1994, he has led the federation since 2019 and helps steer its representation of member unions in dealings with the institutions. “There is more and more workload, which means more and more pressure.”
As Brussels has taken on a more central geopolitical role — responding to Russia’s war against Ukraine, navigating tensions with China and managing an increasingly unpredictable United States — officials said there is a growing sense that every file matters.
Few of the complaints POLITICO heard — ranging from stressful projects and difficult bosses to endless bureaucracy and aging offices — are unique to the Commission, and similar stories can be found in ministries, law firms and consultancies across Europe. But officials said the combination of prestige, political pressure and the sheer scale of the institution makes the experience distinctive — and often difficult.
“It’s the EU’s executive so people have this weird God complex,” one official said.
A Commission spokesperson said the institution was “committed to being a modern, respectful and attractive place to work,” pointing to a review launched by President Ursula von der Leyen into the Commission’s operations. An internal survey found 74 percent of staff rated the Commission an attractive employer, up six percentage points from 2023.
Comparable public data is scarce. A 2025 staff survey at the European Central Bank found that 85 percent of employees were proud to work there, even as fewer than half considered their workload manageable. The figures point to a broader paradox: loyalty to an institution can remain strong even when day-to-day working conditions frustrate its staff. At the Commission, that gap helps explain why disillusionment does not necessarily lead people to leave.
Pressure cooker
Openings at the Commission, where employees shape policies affecting more than 450 million Europeans, remain some of the most sought-after public sector jobs. Brussels also remains relatively affordable compared to many Western European capitals, especially on a Commission salary.
The financial incentives are considerable too. Successful candidates for AD-5 jobs — the graduate-entry administrator role — earn roughly €6,000 to €7,000 a month before allowances, while Commission officials pay EU tax rather than national income tax, generally resulting in a lighter tax burden and more take-home pay. Family allowances, diplomatic discounts on cars and strong job security only add to the appeal. Some officials POLITICO spoke to even rent an apartment in Brussels while keeping their families in another country, flying home most weekends.
But several officials said the prestige of working at the Commission also creates its own pressures.
That atmosphere, officials said, filters down into daily life. Every briefing note, policy paper or press release attracts multiple layers of approval. Decisions move through sprawling email chains and successive rounds of revisions, while officials feel pressure to treat even routine work with the urgency of a geopolitical crisis.
One official in a commissioner’s cabinet said their days often begin at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. and end around 7 p.m., with little time away from the office except to accompany their commissioner on missions. Another, working in communications, recalled crying late into the evening because of an overwhelming workload.
Several officials blamed the bureaucracy itself. Cabinet teams and the Commission’s policy departments, known as Directorates-General, often struggle to communicate effectively, leaving staff chasing approvals and information from one another.
“The DGs are waiting for scraps of information from the cabinets, who are so overworked that they don’t have the capacity to provide them that information,” another official working for a commissioner said. “It’s a structural problem. Everyone is trying to get information out of each other.”
Another official agreed. “I want to shoot myself sometimes.”
The institution’s sheer size can also leave people feeling anonymous. “There are thousands of people at the Commission, so even if you work there for 20 years, most people have never seen you,” a different official not working for a commissioner said. “You’re just this tiny little molecule in this huge organism.”
Mixed bag
Whether someone enjoys working at the Commission often comes down to luck.
First, there’s the boss.
Officials stressed that experiences can differ dramatically depending on which commissioner you work for. Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra’s cabinet is widely regarded internally as supportive, several officials said, while other commissioners have reputations internally for allowing toxic working cultures to develop, with infighting and power grabs.
One senior official in a commissioner’s cabinet has become notorious inside the Berlaymont for “screaming” at staff, according to two officials. An employee at DG ECHO, which coordinates the EU’s humanitarian program, said shouting was routine in their unit.
Another former official recalled watching a senior colleague berated over a leaked document in front of other managers. One official said their boss punched them during an argument after work in a bar near the Berlaymont.
Several said they felt they had little confidence complaints would be acted upon.
The Commission hired a chief confidential counsellor in 2024 to handle harassment complaints and has a team of 40 counsellors across the Commission and executive agencies as part of an “informal” approach to resolving workplace conflict, an official said.
Since September 2024, the chief counsellor, who reports to Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin, has received 960 reports from “colleagues feeling harassed, alleged harassers, witnesses, managers and HR Correspondents,” according to a Commission spokesperson.
The Commission said 14,000 staff have attended presentations on anti-harassment policy while 2,400 managers have attended mandatory training sessions in the last two years. This increased awareness about how to seek support in dealing with harassment has “generated a relatively high number” of reports to the chief confidential counsellor, the spokesperson said.
The chief counsellor, however, “has no mandate to investigate and is not entitled legally to qualify the conduct as harassment as defined in the Staff Regulations,” the spokesperson explained. To make a formal complaint, staff have to go to the Investigation and Disciplinary Office (IDOC) or to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF). The Commission receives around 20 to 25 of those per year, a spokesperson said.
Aging offices
Then there’s the building.
While the Berlaymont has benefited from extensive renovation, other Commission offices are showing their age. During June’s heatwave, staff at the DG AGRI building complained they were working without adequate air conditioning, according to internal communications seen by POLITICO.
At DG COMP’s headquarters in Madou Tower, meanwhile, officials were advised not to drink from certain water fountains because of possible contamination, while heating and sanitation systems were “not functioning to the level we should expect,” the acting director-general acknowledged in an email seen by POLITICO.
At the Berlaymont, staff on lower levels were left fuming after air conditioning was switched off in the middle of a heat wave but kept on for floors eight and above, which house commissioners and senior officials. An official told POLITICO at the time it was reminiscent of feudalism.
Experiences varied sharply across the institution, but many officials described the same tension: they remained drawn to the substance of their roles, even as their working conditions proved more frustrating and draining than expected.
Over cold pasta in a Commission cafeteria, one official was asked whether they were happy.
They shrugged. “It’s interesting work.”
For many inside the Commission, that is reason enough to stay.
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LONDON — Andy Burnham entered Downing Street with a promise to give hard-pressed voters “breathing space” on the cost of living. Now he must show he can deliver.
At the top of his list is finding a way to reduce stubbornly high energy bills — even as the Iran-U.S. war forces up prices and ministers are under pressure to cut their own departmental budgets. The new prime minister knows any intervention must make a real impact for voters if he is to turn Labour’s fortunes around.
“You need to make an emotional connection with people,” said one senior government official, granted anonymity to talk candidly about Whitehall thinking.
Britain’s new prime minister has already made one bid to show voters he is serious about tackling the problem: Removing VAT from household electricity bills, something he announced on his first day in No. 10.
The move will knock less than £4 off the average monthly bill, ends after one year, and comes with a price tag of £850 million. Downing Street said it will be paid for through so-far unspecified Whitehall savings.
But Burnham and his new Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, promised that the intervention is just a start. Cutting VAT is a “down payment” ahead of the winter, Fahnbulleh said.
Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh arrives at 10 Downing Street for Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first cabinet meeting, on July 21, 2026 in London, England. | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
That means ministers have just weeks before Burnham’s first budget this fall to figure out what, if anything, can really ease the burden — and how to pay for it.
Salami slicing
“The fiscal space is going to be a challenge, and that is the case for any government,” said Sam Alvis, associate director for environment, energy security, and nature at the Labour-aligned Institute for Public Policy Research think tank.
That’s because any intervention to bring down energy bills will have to be funded from already under-pressure Whitehall departments.
“This government is going to have a look at the budget. Whether it chooses to do some priorities differently — that is an open question,” Alvis said.
One option for Burnham is to slice more charges from electricity bills, as he did with VAT. But any savings could be quickly wiped out if, as expected, the Middle East crisis pushes up wholesale gas prices.
Forecasters at Cornwall Insight predict that average annual household bills will rise by two percent this fall, even after the VAT intervention.
That leaves Burnham facing the same problems as the man he replaced, Keir Starmer.
Starmer cut £150 off yearly bills last November by shifting some so-called green levies, used to fund a clean energy scheme, onto general taxation. By the summer, that cut had been swallowed up by higher prices driven by the Strait of Hormuz crisis.
Nonetheless, Alvis said, this approach remains Burnham’s most realistic option.
“We are now in a bit of a scenario of salami slicing, where you’re aggregating lots and lots of smaller bits,” he said. “There’s no one big thing that you can do that’s going to take over £100 off bills. So, it’s about accumulating all those things that you think you could possibly do in one go, so it becomes sizable and noticeable.”
Decisions, decisions
One of those options, proposed by the think tank Nesta and reportedly being considered by Burnham, involves shifting further green levies from electricity bills onto tax.
It identified another £42 of savings from a yearly bill, costing the Treasury £1.7 billion per year for a decade.
Every small cut helps consumers, insists Andrew Sissons, Nesta’s director of sustainable futures. The think tank has also proposed knocking £22 a year off bills by shifting the standing charge on gas — currently a fixed daily fee — onto the unit rate, which changes depending on how much energy a home uses. That would take a year to implement and would not cost the government a penny, Nesta says.
But such moves must be accompanied by larger interventions if voters are to feel the benefit, he added.
“The amount you’d need to cut people’s energy bills … for it to feel like a real difference is quite substantial,” he said. The government, he argued, should aim for a “big package.”
If the government aims for larger changes, they would come with even greater costs.
Nesta has suggested a one-off move to wipe out electricity debt, removing some bailout costs currently funded through bills, taking total annual bill savings to £130. But the Treasury would have to find £2.7 billion to fund that.
“[We] shouldn’t ignore the fact that there are fiscal trade-offs. But if the government wants to prioritize energy bills, then this is the kind of step it needs to take,” Sissons added, pointing to their proposed levy change alongside the VAT cut.
Things take time
Net-zero policies will, ministers hope, bring down bills for good. But large-scale changes take years to implement.
“Realistically, the only way to deeply, deeply help people is to get them solar panels, is to get them an EV [electric vehicle], potentially heat pumps in some houses as well,” said Alvis.
This is another reason to opt for “salami slicing”, he said: To “alter the balance of electricity and gas prices, so that those clean technologies stack up and save people even more money.”
Alex Bevan, a research fellow at the Future Governance Forum, agreed that big savings attached to the shift to green energy were still a way off.
“There aren’t quick workarounds on whichever form of energy you choose to generate and deploy,” he said. But government must nonetheless “lock in the benefits [of clean energy],” he argued.
The same official quoted above stressed that no decision had yet been made on how the government would intervene on bills. Asked whether the government favored a series of small policies or one big intervention, they said: “It doesn’t have to be binary. … It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “The energy secretary’s focus is bringing bills down for good. We will tackle the cost of living to make life’s essentials affordable again and bring back hope.”
For now, Alvis insisted, Burnham has one thing going for him: He can operate in the knowledge voters accept international issues are pushing up costs.
“The political point I would make is: By doing your best effort, you give yourself the space to have a conversation with the public,” he said.
The news came the way it always comes in my family, sideways, through a phone. I was in my living room, sunk into the chaise lounge I retreat to, comfortable in a way that now embarrasses me, when I heard my mother’s voice in the other room calling my father. Something in her tone. You learn your parents’ registers the way you learn weather, and this was the register of bad news from far away.
Greece was burning again. Crete worst of all, in the south, where a fire near Rethymno had driven some 8,000 people from their homes in a single night. Fires on Paros and Andros, scattered across the Aegean. And then the name I had been bracing against: Lesbos. A blaze near Plomari, the old ouzo town on the island’s south coast, was eating coastal homes while roughly 100 firefighters fought it, and a seaside resort emptied into the dark.
The fires are not a freak event, and no one in Greece pretends they are. They began in early July and have barely paused since; this is the second week of a major outbreak, dozens of fronts at once, fed by a record European heat wave, a spring of too little rain and the Meltemi, the dry seasonal winds that come screaming down the Aegean in July and August at up to 100 kilometers an hour and turn a spark into a wall. Scientists have said it plainly: Climate change is loading the dice, the Mediterranean’s pine and olive and dry scrub catch faster and burn hotter than they used to, and summers like this one are becoming the rule, not the exception. Greece has always burned in August. It has not always burned like this.
My father is from Lesbos. My mother’s people are from there too, further back, so the island runs down both sides of me like a watermark you only see when the light hits it right. It is where my family’s houses stand, where a portion of my life is already promised, where I know I will one day go to live for a while, because the pull has never once loosened. It is, if I am honest, where I come from in the deepest sense, not only the blood but the making. My love of poetry, my hunger for art — I trace all of it back to that island, to Sappho, who sang there 26 centuries ago and somehow reached a Greek-American boy in Pennsylvania and told him what he was.
I have not set foot on Lesbos in 10 years.
That is the sentence, the amount of time, I keep circling. Now I watch it burn on a screen from a soft chair, an ocean and a lifetime away, useless.
There is a particular helplessness to diaspora I have never quite found the words for, though I keep trying. You love a place you are not in. You grieve a fire you cannot smell.
There is a particular helplessness to diaspora I have never quite found the words for, though I keep trying. You love a place you are not in. You grieve a fire you cannot smell. You refresh a feed for news of a village whose name your relatives say with their whole mouths and you say with an accent that gives you away. The distance is not only miles. It is the knowledge that everyone there is living what you are merely watching, and that watching, from comfort, is its own small shame.
I was made by that island’s water. They tell me that as a baby, I would not leave the sea. I would stay in the Aegean until I cried at being carried out, submerging myself again and again until, the family story goes, I matched the sea, my skin gone the temperature of it, indistinguishable, a small animal that had already decided where it belonged. Even now, when I step into that water, something in me resets. The sun on it, the salt, the particular blue no postcard has ever gotten right — it reconnects me to my own being, returns me to whatever I was before the world got complicated.
There was a year, when I was barely one, that the island nearly kept me for good: a lost passport, a wary government that took an American baby for a Greek one, and a U.S. congressman who finally untangled it and got me home. It is a longer story than this essay can hold, but its shape has never left me. The point is this: That island has been trying to keep me since before I could speak, and I have spent a decade letting the ocean between us win.
And here is the thing I cannot hold simply, what kept me on the chaise longer than the news required. That same sea that baptized me is, for thousands of others, a grave.
Lesbos is not only my father’s Eden. For more than a decade it has been a frontline, the first Greek soil that exhausted, terrified people touch when they cross from Turkey in boats that were never built for open water. My sacred water is someone else’s last water. My homeland is a stranger’s checkpoint and, if they are lucky, their refuge.
I don’t know how to make those facts, that awful juxtaposition, clean, and I have stopped trying. Both experiences are true. The island is sacred to me for what it gave me, and it is sacred to the fleeing for what it offers them, which is the oldest thing land can offer: safety, ground, a place to stop running.
When the fires come, they do not check anyone’s passport. They take the olive groves and the goats and the summer houses, and they take the makeshift shelters and the fragile new footing of people who had already lost everything once. In Crete, the deadliest front this week, three firefighters have already died trying to hold the line against the blaze. That is what steadies me and breaks me in the same breath, that a land this rich in what it gives, in shade and figs and refuge and myth, keeps burning while the world half-watches.
A Mediterranean summer on fire has become a genre now, a seasonal rerun we thumb past on the way to something else. This year’s footage looks like last year’s, and that of the year before, a sameness that is its own quiet violence. Repetition sands horror down into wallpaper. But it is not wallpaper to the family loading a car in the dark, or to a firefighter’s widow, or to a man in Pennsylvania watching his one island go up in flames on a screen. Familiar is not the same as bearable.
What the fire has done, strangely, is make me want to go back not to take but to give. To help. To stand on the ground instead of scrolling past it. I have spent ten years loving Lesbos as an inheritance, a thing I own from a distance, and the smoke on my screen has shamed that love into something more useful. My mother’s ancestors and my father’s boyhood and Sappho’s fragments and the sea that raised me are all still there, waiting, under a sky the color of alarm. My uncle is in Athens. My family’s houses are still standing, for now. And I am here, finally understanding that loving a place from afar is not the same as loving it.
I think I will go to Lesbos this year. Not because the fire is out, but because it isn’t. The sea is still there. It is still the color no one can name. And it is still, for me and for the strangers arriving on its shore, the difference between drowning and being born.
Imagine this conversation with your spouse or roommate: “Dude, what is that smell? It stinks like burning diapers. Did you forget to pay the air?” Sounds like something from a knockoff episode of “Black Mirror,” right? Canned air was actually used as a bit in “Spaceballs,” with the joke being how absurd it is to pay for something we breathe freely.
While I claim no clairvoyant skills, given the ever-diminishing quality of the air we breathe, purified air could definitely become a commodity someday. Air subscription probably wouldn’t work exactly like other utilities, such as internet service or natural gas, where it gets pumped directly into your house, but then again, who is to say? The future could be as weird as the present and when it comes to air quality, things are changing fast.
At the moment, a new front in the endless culture wars concerns whether air conditioning is ethical or even necessary. That comes in the wake of yet another record-breaking heat wave that has pummeled the Northern Hemisphere. Europeans aren’t big fans of AC, it turns out, but things have gotten so hot that many people are now making the switch. It’s become a selling point for far-right figures like French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, who has promised to blanket Europe in cool air, while British conservatives want to deregulate building codes that restrict AC.
Most forms of air conditioning are highly energy-intensive and, depending on its power source, can belch even more carbon into the atmosphere, trapping more of the sun’s heat and causing more intense heat waves. That feedback loop is likely part of the reason why temperatures previously considered extreme or impossible are now becoming the norm all over the world — but the suffering might be too great to ignore the benefits of AC.
The June heat wave carried a death toll of more than 10,000 people across 27 countries, according to data from EuroMOMO, a mortality monitoring network with backing from the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Over 9,000 of those deaths were people aged 65 and older. Such extreme heat usually kills people via heatstroke, or by inflaming heart and lung diseases. Whatever the specific causes of death, this was a mass casualty event, on par with the earthquakes that hit Venezuela a few weeks ago. Climate scientists universally agree that this summer’s heat waves would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.
This summer’s Northern Hemisphere heat wave has been a mass casualty event, on a par with the recent earthquakes in Venezuela.
On this side of the ocean, the U.S. is sweltering under its own heat domes, which have been made worse by more than 100 wildfires in Canada and Minnesota that are smothering the East Coast in toxic, deadly smoke, turning the July skies an earwax yellow. Dramatic videos of members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in Ontario fleeing their homes by boat have flooded the internet because the images are truly apocalyptic.
Views of just one of the wildfires ripping across Ontario, Canada yesterday. Similar fire behavior is expected today.
Fires in Minnesota and Canada have made air quality across the east coast of the United States “unsuitable for everyone.”
At least 18 states have issued air quality alerts, as they should, because wildfire smoke wreaks havoc on the body, from the brain to the heart and lungs to the kidneys. The small particles in wildfire smoke are an escalating threat to global health, increasing risks of other diseases like COVID. As noted in a recent review in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health, these effects are not evenly distributed. Poor folks, immigrants, women, children, the elderly and ethnic and racial minorities are disproportionately exposed to these hazards.
But we’re all kind of used to this by now, right? And that’s a big problem. We now deal with wildfire smoke every year, in a “season” that stretches longer and longer each year thanks to warmer and drier conditions. Air pollution, wildfire smoke, industrial disasters like the East Palestine, Ohio train wreck and extended pollen seasons are all reasons why people are increasingly concerned with making their indoor environments actually breathable. The result is that air itself is increasingly becoming a luxury item.
The World Health Organization estimates that around 7 million people die from air pollution annually, while 99% of the world’s population lives somewhere that is exposed to air pollution levels above WHO health guidelines. So we stock up on air purifiers, now an $18 billion industry, along with indoor air quality monitors and subscription air filter services. While AC seems ubiquitous to middle-class Americans, approximately 34 million people in the U.S. struggle to afford it, which doesn’t account for the high-tech HVAC systems the ultra-rich indulge in. The issue of quality air access is increasingly linked privilege and wealth. Startups with names like Air Factory and FreshAir are already starting to crop up aiming to fill this growing market demand.
So what will the future really look like? Will people start wearing N95 masks indoors, or have breathing apparatuses hooked up to their chests like fighter pilots? Will air become a municipal service, or a luxury commodity like canned kombucha? If you miss your monthly payment to Amazon Oxygen, will you choke to death? Given the way things are trending, none of that would be entirely surprising. Summer 2026 is already on track to be the hottest in recorded human history, topping 2024, which edged out 2023’s record. (We saw a slight dip in average temperatures in 2025; it didn’t last.) This might well be the hottest summer of your lifetime, and also might be the coolest summer of the rest of your life. Read that sentence again: If you think things are bad now, wait a year. Or five.
My imaginary scenario could still be decades in the future, but a reality where people pay for air doesn’t seem like a joke anymore. We could decide to treat this sci-fi possibility seriously right now by working to cut down air pollution at the source. That would mean, at the very least, sharply reducing the use of fossil fuels — indeed, ending it, sooner rather than later — and choosing to protect forests instead of chopping them down for toilet paper, which is a big factor in why so much of Canada is burning in the first place.
The good news here — and there is some, believe it or not — is that we’re still in the middle of a global green energy revolution, even if it’s being diminished or undercut by the out-of-control AI industry. As much as the Trump administration denies the reality of climate change while catering to the fossil fuel industry, the Iran war and its resulting spike in energy prices are accelerating the transition to renewable energy. We can’t be sure if that’s happening rapidly enough to make a difference, but it remains true that every decision we make now to lower emissions will help to create a more livable future. Of course it’s absurd to imagine breathable air as something you can put a price tag on. The same could be said about food, water and healthcare. We can at least keep air in the realm of absurdity by fighting for a greener future, which we can still see ahead, even through the smoke.
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