Europe heatwave: Air conditioning creates political divide as France records hottest day - "With temperatures soaring, France is being forced to re-think its longstanding reservations about one possible answer to climate change: air-con. This week debate about la clim (climatisation) has once again burst out, with Marine Le Pen on the populist right urging a mass subsidised roll-out and traditionally hostile Greens conceding that some air-conditioning may now be inevitable. Currently the country has a low take-up, with only 25% of households equipped with an air-con unit. In Spain and Italy the figure is 50%, and in the US and Japan 90%. French hospitals and schools are also only rarely equipped. Thousands of schools have had to shut this week, and medical and nursing staff complain of conditions fast becoming intolerable. But with temperatures nudging 40C - Tuesday was France's hottest day on record - there has been a rush to buy portable air-conditioning appliances, just to let children enjoy a few hours in class, or for suffocating apartment-dwellers to make it through the night. And more and more, it seems, long-standing opponents of air-conditioning - mainly on the environmentalist left - recognise that it is bound to be part of the country's response to global warming. This week the head of the Ecologists party Marine Tondelier broke something of a taboo when she said that air-conditioning would be needed in schools and hospitals. "There are places where we just can't do without it now," she said. Her break with what she called "anti-clim dogma" is significant because until now the Green movement in France has regarded air-conditioning as the worst of solutions to climate change. Far from attacking the root causes of global-warming, activists said, recourse to la clim was merely attenuating the effects of global-warming. And by making those effects more bearable, it distracted from the essential fight against the causes. Not only that, but air-conditioning is often criticised by environmentalists for aggravating climate change... Suspicion of air-conditioning has also infiltrated government policy. New building and renovation norms focus quite naturally on insulation, greenery and hi-tech methods for air-circulation - with the express aim of making air-conditioning unnecessary. A giant new hospital being built in the Brittany city of Nantes for example will have air-conditioning in only half its rooms, provoking the wrath of medical trade unions. "In the environmental context, we should have la clim everywhere," said Olivier Terrien of the CGT union. According to Valerie Pécresse, the conservative president of the Paris regional council, "The state operates under an anti-clim ideology. But air-conditioning has got to be brought into the picture, along with other methods for creating cool." Pécresse, who controls Paris regional transport, hopes to have all buses and trains equipped with aircon by 2032, and she castigates her Socialist predecessor for failing to see its importance. The political right has always been more pro-clim than the left - and none more so than the National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen. "
Left wingers just want people to suffer unnecessarily
EU Commission HQ forced to shut down air-conditioning amid heatwave - "Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.” The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above... The Commission issued guidance for its staff earlier this week, which included avoiding going outside at the hottest times of day, drinking water regularly and starting work earlier. But the advice angered some Commission staff who work in buildings without air-conditioning, including DG AGRI, according to internal communications seen by POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook. “It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on. A second official agreed it was a “disgrace.” A third staffer working on the 8th floor told POLITICO on Friday that even with working AC, the temperature inside was still 25.7 degrees. The heat wave has prompted a renewed discussion about the lack of air-conditioning systems in homes and offices across much of Europe. Only about one-fifth of households on the continent have AC. In Belgium, one-fifth of all trains are without AC, prompting the national rail company to cancel many peak-hour services. The European Parliament has also faced blackouts this week due to energy consumption from cranking up its cooling system."
ApoStructura on X - "In France hospital temperatures are reaching 35°C+ (95°F). You’re literally safer in an office building which are some of the only places in France that install AC. Europe’s irrational obsession against AC is killing people in the places that are supposed to save them."
Fraser Myers on X - "The Net Zero anti-aircon argument (if it has been thought through at all) is essentially that instead of cooling air instantly and cheaply, we need to persuade every government on Earth to abandon economic growth forever in the hope that at some point between the years 2300 and 3000, average temperatures will settle at about half a degree Celsius above 1990s levels"
Chris Carter on X - "Surely anyone pursuing Net Zero will have a surplus of solar electricity to run AC at exactly the same time as it's needed?"
Alex C-J on X - "Until the evenings, where people are still blasting air con in order to sleep but solar isn't generating. Plus, there's often no wind during heat waves. Better to just use nuclear!"
Tony Aubé on X - "After a hellish week in a Paris Airbnb with no AC (100°F outside, 108°F+ inside), I started looking into why the French are so opposed to AC. There's many reasons: bureaucracy, poverty, etc. But the main one is decades of environmental campaigns that convinced people AC is the devil. The result? You can't escape the heat. Most buses, metro lines, and shopping malls have no AC. This Monday, 850 schools are closing because classroom temperatures exceed 104°F. In Nantes, they built a brand-new train station and a hospital without AC for environmental reasons. The station is now partially closed because it's become a "furnace" that endangers travelers. Hospitals are covering windows with emergency foil blankets to protect patients. The French demonize air conditioning because it creates carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. Never mind that France already has one of most carbon-free electricity in the world thanks to nuclear, or that it accounts for less than 1% of global emissions. They also oppose AC because it "just displace the problem" by dumping heat into the street. Never mind that studies suggest even if an entire city were air-conditioned, the increase in outdoor temperature would be at most about 1°F. Instead, people are willing to endure 104°F+ indoors to avoid a marginal increase outdoors. This ideology kills more people than firearms in the United States. Across Europe, between 50,000 and 70,000 people die from heat every year, mostly the elderly and the poor. Compare that to roughly 44,000 Americans killed by firearms. For comparison, despite having a similar population, deserts, and more extreme temperatures, the United States has only about 2,500 heat-related deaths per year thanks to widespread AC. That's what bothers me most. The moralizing posture completely detached from reality. People feel morally superior for "not polluting." They criticize America and its guns while tolerating policies that kills even more people. I share this anecdote because I know it's shocking to Americans. Here, schools or hospitals reaching 104°F would be unnaceptable. The absurdity is immediately obvious to us because we're looking from the outside. We see the gap between moral intentions and real-world consequences. But we're no different. In America, we have dozens of similar issues where we're just as irrational, and we've become blind to them because the solution isn't politically acceptable. How do can we bring back logic and pragmatism in our societies ahead of irrational political ideological ?"
Miss Jo on X - "This is true socialism. In France. École Primaire La Planette is a primary school in Nîmes, a town in southern France. A child recently fainted because of the heat (40 deg). Classes were being taught in corridors to get out of the heat. The parents got together to raise money for five portable air conditioning units. It took them only 3 days to raise the €2,000. They installed the units. Great, you think. Not according to the current municipal team in Nîmes (left-wing coalition led by communist mayor Vincent Bouget). Bouget has told the school to remove the units because “it sets a precedent” and “in some neighbourhoods, parents don’t have the means to act”. Yes, you read that correctly. He is objecting on the grounds that it is unfair to other schools and causes inequality."
Thread by @RnaudBertrand on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "It says an awful lot about France - and not in a good way - that there is "political divide" on using air conditioning when temperatures literally exceed those of the Sahara desert, and when France has one of the greenest energy mixes in the world (thanks to nuclear). And it says even more that those who oppose AC are often the same as those who oppose nuclear: the view - presumably - is that you should neither adapt to climate change (AC) nor prevent it (nuclear). Also the same people, incidentally, who oppose pesticides and fertilizers - basically modern farming - and push for all-organic: a prescription that, if universally applied, would literally starve billions of people (and, ironically, would require so much additional farmland it would devastate the world's remaining forests). It's all part of the same logical fallacy, the notion that if something causes a problem, then that thing is the problem. Yes progress and technology caused and continue to cause plenty of environmental issues. And there is indeed something seductive in saying "we've gone too far, let's change tracks, let's head towards a simpler, slower life, we used to be like that." But not only is this just not feasible without causing far greater harm to ourselves, it's also a fundamentally nihilistic and mortiferous ideology. One that rests on a profound discomfort with what's arguably the single most defining feature of humanity: our ability to shape our environment to suit us, to fight our circumstances rather than surrender to them. That's been the case ever since we discovered fire and invented farming. It is, at the end of the day, the transformation of humanity's genius - our need to create and improve our condition - into a vice. They make it sound like a humanistic project but how could it be since the core premise is fear of humans and contempt for our very nature? Conclusion: yes, 100 times yes, use AC. You'd need to be a complete moron to let yourself boil under 43C heat in order to "save the planet." If climate change is to be solved, it will be by getting the ideologues out of the way of the people who actually fix things... And by the way, if you watch this video of North Korea (ignore the ridiculous music and ridiculous framing) you'll notice one thing: all buildings have AC 🤷"
Environmentalism is nihilistic and misanthropic after all. When humans are viewed as a burden on and the primary source of damage to the environment, the ultimate solution is to get rid of humanity
OPINION: The French are right to shun air conditioning - even during heatwaves - "air conditioning is very far from being the only solution to heatwaves. A 40C day in Paris is a very different experience to a 40C day in Nice. Why? Quite simply because Nice was designed for the heat - its old town has narrow streets that remain shady, its squares are planted with trees, there are Italian-style covered streets to provide shade and the older buildings have foot-thick walls and small windows. Paris was not designed for heat, because until recently it didn't get very hot here - but the difference between the Nice and Paris experience shows what a difference city design can make... The city's chief engineer Franck Lirzin has published a fascinating book (Paris face au changement climatique) on the changes that can be made to housing and public space to keep the city liveable, even if temperatures one day hit 50C. Many of these will be complicated and expensive to implement - and will certainly run into challenges from people keen to defend Paris' heritage such as those iconic but horribly energy-inefficient zinc roofs. But the point is that it can be done without air conditioning - and blanket installation of AC will remove any incentive to push ahead with these changes. Heatwaves already disproportionately affect the poor - those in badly-insulated homes, the homeless, those doing tough outdoor work in precarious jobs. Installation of AC for those who can afford it will mean that the well-off will lose the motivation to push for nationwide change... Behaviour will also need to adapt - just as it already has in countries that have always been hot, where people take a siesta during the hottest part of the day and work in the cooler mornings and evenings. This is already the case for outdoor workers in France, where the law now requires employers to make 'reasonable adjustments' to the work schedule so that people are not outdoors during the hottest part of the day. It seems likely that more adjustments will follow. The searing heat at the peak of a heatwave is frightening and climate change is frightening. We are correct to be scared of these things, what we need now is for the fear to push us into action. As the front page of the French newspaper Libération puts it, we must politicise the heatwave"
When left wingers are open that they want to cause misery to push through the left wing agenda. Clearly, Europe letting tens of thousands of old people die of heat will inspire China and India to destroy their economies too to fight climate change
Clearly, it is a good use of public money to implement complicated and expensive changes just because air conditioning is evil. As Richard Dawkins observed, the retreat of Christianity has opened the way to worse
Leonardo Panetta on X - (Translated from Italian) "France. It's hot. People would like air conditioning. Monique Barbut, the environment minister in the Lecornu government, says she's horrified by these requests because no one is thinking about climate change. Her ministry has air conditioning. Surreal debate as seen from the rest of the world."
ShanghaiPanda （ Account deactivation） on X - "The weather is so hot, are your home's air conditioners working at full power?😃 In China, AC is cheap, electricity is also cheap, and some peasants even provide AC for the pigs they raise.❄️🐷"
Richard Hanania on X - "Germans are so anti-human that they don't even have air conditioning in many hospitals, so pregnant women are forced to sweat it out during heat waves in order to protect the environment."
Andrew Hammel on X - "The cardiac unit of the Düsseldorf University Hospital, where people recover from heart surgery, is currently measuring 38°C/ 100.4°F. As you can see, the building is only about 15 years old. And built without central air-conditioning."
Megan McArdle on X - "The fact that Europeans built hospitals without AC is truly mystifying to me. We can argue about whether it's good/necessary in homes, I suppose, but the people in hospitals are the most likely to die of heat stroke!"
Andrew Hammel on X - "So here's a story about the Düsseldorf University Hospital where heart patients are sweltering in 38°/100.4° temperatures right now because this 15-year-old building lacks central A/C. I taught at the law faculty of this university for 15 years. When the law faculty built a new expansion in 2005, I asked whether it would be air-conditioned. They said: "No, because then every building on campus would ask for it". I thought to myself, "Well, that's Europe for you. Crabs in a bucket." Then the university announced plans for this new building, the one you see in the picture, which would be the main university hospital. That was in 2013 or thereabouts. Shortly thereafter, they published the plans and sketches online. No A/C infrastructure visible. At some sort of faculty function, I asked the dean or assistant dean of the medical faculty whether they were going to install central air-conditioning on this building. "It's no problem if lawyers are brain-fuddled because of the heat -- in fact it might be a bonus! -- but surgeons? Patients?" The dean answered: "Well, we asked, but the construction board and city officials said no, because if this new building gets air-conditioning, then all the older buildings on the university campus will demand it." "Even though this is a fucking hospital?" I asked with typical American coarseness. "Yes, even though it's a hospital," responded the dean, staring with chagrin into his beer. And so now dozens of people recovering from open-heart surgery are bathing in their own sweat. Across the country, thousands of people are dying in un-air-conditioned hospitals right now. As in all former heatwaves, there will be institutional pressure at all levels to attribute their deaths to underlying ailments, not the fact that they sweltered for over a week in brutal temperatures."
Marian L Tupy on X - ".@guardian is (unintentionally) funny: "AC is quantifiably bad, but I think it’s also philosophically problematic... When you can buy a personal bubble of coolness and not truly feel the heat, the screaming urgency to tackle the collective issue of a world on fire can recede slightly."
When left wingers proclaim that they want to make people miserable to push the left wing agenda
Ali Utlu on X - Translated from German "If Germany and Belgium had not shut down their nuclear power plants, all of Europe could have run air conditioners at full blast throughout the entire summer and still caused fewer CO₂ emissions than now. The “Greens” are destroying the world and causing tens of thousands of deaths every year."
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Europe's crusade against air conditioning is slaughtering elderly Europeans, and is not helping the climate."
Of course, if you were against covid lockdowns you just wanted grandma to die
Europe Leads World in Heat Deaths Despite Fewer Hot Days (aka "How Europe Became the World Champion of Heat Deaths") - "Here is a trivia question: which continent suffers the most heat-related deaths per capita? By a wide margin, the dubious prize goes to… Europe. In the summer of 2022 alone, more than 61,000 Europeans died as a result of the heat. Europe is again crushed by a record-breaking heat wave, and we can safely predict that thousands of people will die this week. In case you feel geographically confused: no, the equator does not run through Brussels. Thanks to its northern latitude, Europe in fact endures fewer heat days than almost any other inhabited region on Earth. How, then, can it hold the record for heat mortality?... Part of the story is of course demographic. Europe has one of the oldest populations in the world, and the elderly are far more vulnerable to high temperatures. But age explains only a sliver of the gap. The United States is greying too, and Japan is older still than both—yet the risk of dying from heat in either country is dramatically lower. The real explanation comes down to two letters Europe stubbornly refuses to learn: A/C. Across the continent, only about a fifth of homes have air conditioning, against nearly 90 percent in the United States and more than 90 percent in Japan... Anyone who doubts the causal link should consult the historical record. The economist Alan Barreca has shown that the risk of death on extremely hot days in the United States fell by roughly 75 percent over the twentieth century—a decline that happened in lockstep with the mass adoption of air conditioning after 1960. In his words: “the adoption of residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline in the temperature-mortality relationship.”... Nor does heat affect only the old. For every degree above 25°C (77°F), our cognitive performance declines by around two percent. And if synapses suffer, so does economic activity. At 30°C, office performance drops by almost 9 percent. Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, was once asked to name the secret of his tropical city-state’s economic miracle. His answer consisted of the same two letters, A/C, which he hailed as one of the signal inventions of history. By keeping the heat outside, Singapore could stay productive all year round... So why does Europe recoil from a technology which the rest of the developed world (and even large parts of the developing world) take for granted? Part of the answer is historical and cultural. Northern Europe in particular, with its cool climate and mild seasonal swings, had little need for cooling until a few decades ago. But that excuse no longer cuts much ice. The deeper cause is an ideological “less is more” sensibility, more potent in Europe than anywhere else, which frames artificial cooling as a decadent indulgence—something for profligate Yankees with oversized SUVs and backyard pools. That this instinct is especially rampant among European progressives is even more puzzling. Leftists of old such as Karl Marx and Sylvia Pankhurst dreamed of universal abundance and denounced the scarcity mindset; they wanted the masses to share in the comforts once reserved for the rich, not to ration them in the name of nature or virtue. Today’s green gospel of restraint quietly inverts that aspiration, with comfort itself becoming suspect. In practice, Europeans of all ages are told to suck it up and sweat it out. France would sooner close its schools in a heat wave than fit them with devices that demonstrably improve concentration and learning. In the Swiss canton of Geneva, installing an air conditioner requires an exceptional permit demonstrating “real need” (such as a doctor’s certificate). During the recent energy crisis, Spain and Italy barred public buildings from cooling below 27°C—hot enough to dull your cognitive powers by 5 percent. In the midst of the current deadly heat wave, my own city of Ghent is officially advising people to “avoid air-conditioners”. The resistance is baked into European regulation. In many countries a conventional air conditioner lowers your building’s energy rating. The result is entirely predictable: owners and landlords decline to install units, or rip out the ones they have. Those left without built-in cooling fall back on drafty, inefficient portables that can scarcely make a dent in the temperature. I own one myself—a wheezing box with a fat hose shoved through a rickety fabric covering the window. It is the thermodynamic equivalent of mopping the floor with the tap running, but that’s simply the direction in which Europe’s regulations have nudged me. The A/C aversion has even penetrated into the commanding heights of European officialdom. In its public guidance on heat, the World Health Organization mentions air conditioning only in passing and conditionally (“Well, if you must use air conditioning…”). In its statement on the 175,000 heat deaths annually in the WHO’s European region, it says nothing about artificial cooling at all. Instead, citizens are advised to draw the curtains and drink enough water, as though it were still 1955. A 200-page WHO report on heat prevention grants air conditioning a single grudging page, immediately followed by two and a half pages about its “drawbacks.” Journalists and academics are little better. One lengthy feature on heat deaths in a Belgian newspaper found room for speculative climate projections about heat days out to 2100, and for half-measures like white roofs and planting trees, but not one mention of the life-saving technology that Lee Kuan Yew celebrated. This is a technophobia that costs lives, as the data scientist Hannah Ritchie observes in her book Not the End of the World. In 2020 and 2021, Western governments spent billions protecting the elderly from COVID death. Why, then, is the same vulnerable group denied a cool room in a heat wave? The reflexive objection—carbon emissions—does not survive contact with the numbers. As wealthy economies decarbonise their electricity grids, they have already begun to decouple growth from emissions. Consider that the average European burns far more carbon to stay warm in winter than to stay cool in summer—yet no politician would dream of capping the winter thermostat at 15°C, or of denouncing central heating as a decadent luxury for the soft. As Leigh Phillips wrote: “Apart from its relatively novelty, A/C is morally no different from clothing and fire.”... Warm Sweater Day: join in and win! - Leiden University The common thread is a lite-version of the degrowth creed: the conviction that energy use is a kind of sin that we should atone for and reduce as much as possible. Until the 1960s, politicians and utilities promised an age of energy “too cheap to meter.” Now Shell, Engie, and EDF buy advertising space to urge customers to consume less of their own product, peddling slogans such as “the cleanest energy is the energy not consumed.” How strange it is for a private company to coach its customers to buy less of what it sells—a commercial squeamishness that makes sense only in the light of the European doctrine of secular penance."
