With temperatures nudging 40C and Tuesday becoming France’s hottest day on record, the country’s longstanding reservations about air-conditioning are being forced into retreat. 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.
Only about 25% of homes in France have 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.
“France’s air-con divide deepens as Le Pen urges mass roll-out and Greens concede necessity in schools and hospitals.”
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, 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 Marie 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. This is because it requires electricity to run — and though most of France’s electricity comes from nuclear power, elsewhere it means more fossil-fuels being burned.
There is also the question of the refrigerant gases used in air-conditioning, which are greenhouse gases and often leak. And there is the urban heating effect, caused by the expulsion of hot air onto the street. Arguments rage, but some studies suggest this can raise city temperatures by two or three degrees.
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.