Tony Aubé@aubetony
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 ?
