Sweating While Worrying About Shivering

Sweating While Worrying About Shivering

International and Arab News

What makes our current situation so unnerving is an outbreak of “non-simultaneity.” At least that’s what I recently heard Robert Habeck, Germany’s energy and commerce minister, tell a gathering of German industrialists.

What a big word, I thought to myself. And what a difficult — though possibly deep — concept. That’s just like Habeck. A leader of the environmentalist Greens in the German governing coalition, he’s also a serial co-author (with his wife) of novels and children’s books. He has an intellectual curiosity that’s rare among politicos.

A simple example of the non-simultaneity he was talking about might be the backstory behind this week’s weather. Much of Europe has been sweltering in record-busting temperatures. People are sweating and panting, doing their best to stay hydrated and avoid heat stroke.

At the exact same time, people like Habeck are trying to prepare Europeans for the opposite scenario in the winter months, when they’ll probably have to shiver in cooler homes and offices, because the whole continent will have to conserve natural gas that Russia, as part of its economic warfare, will no longer deliver.

In a circuitous way, these problems are connected. The heat waves are a consequence of climate change, which