European heat wave: Air conditioning creates political divide as France records hottest day

As temperatures rise, France is forced to rethink its long-held position on a possible answer to climate change.

Debate about La Clime (climate change) flared up again this week, with Marine Le Pen on the populist right calling for more subsidies and the normally aggressive Greens admitting that some air conditioning may now be inevitable.

Currently, the country has low coverage and only 25 percent of households are equipped with air conditioners. In Spain and Italy the figure is 50%, and in the US and Japan 90%.

French hospitals and schools are also poorly equipped. Thousands of schools had to close this week, and medical and nursing staff complained that conditions were quickly becoming unbearable.

But as temperatures soared past 40C – Tuesday was France’s hottest day on record – there was a rush to buy portable air-conditioning units, to keep children entertained in classrooms for a few hours or to suffocate apartment dwellers through the night.

And increasingly, longtime opponents of air conditioning — mainly on the left — recognize that the country is inevitably part of the response to global warming.

This week, Marie Tondelaer, head of the Ecologist Party, broke a taboo when she called for air conditioning in schools and hospitals.

“There are places we can’t do without him now,” she said.

Her break with what she calls “anti-climate” dogma is significant because until now the Green Movement in France sees air conditioning as the worst possible solution to climate change.

Far from attacking the root causes of global warming, activists say, the only response to la clim’ is to minimize the effects of global warming.

And by making those effects more bearable, he diverted his attention from the necessary struggle with the causes.

Not only this, but environmentalists criticize air conditioning for exacerbating climate change.

That’s because it needs electricity to run – and while most of France’s electricity comes from nuclear power, it also means a lot of fossil fuels are burned elsewhere.