OPINION: France's air conditioning debate threatens to drown out climate action

Suggestions that the planet is warming rapidly are “alarmist”, according to Le Pen’s Far Right party. And yet she complained last week that successive French governments had failed to spend billions of euros to air-condition homes, trains, buses, hospitals, schools and offices.

This seems a strange argument: like saying that violent crime is not rising but we should give everyone a bullet-proof vest.

The all-time French temperature record was broken last Tuesday and again on Wednesday and then again on Thursday. The grim 2003 record of 15,000 heat-related deaths was probably broken. Another heatwave is feared in July.

Rather than ignite a national debate on global warming the latest “extreme heat event” has provoked a row about air-conditioning. Why does France have so little “clim” (climatisation)?

The politics of air-conditioning in France is fascinating.

The Left is traditionally against it. It is too American; too inaccessible to the poor; too greedy for energy. Above all, it allows people to pretend that climate change is not a serious problem. Better to let them people sweat and ponder the future of the planet.

The latest canicule (heatwave) last week did cause some left-wing politicians to readjust their temperature settings. The Green leader Marine Tondelier said more air-conditioning in hospitals and schools should be part of the response to global warming – but not the whole response. Fair enough.

The hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon was as absolutist as usual. Air-conditioning would make global warming worse by increasing carbon emissions, he said. This is not strictly true in France where 80 percent of electricity is nuclear-generated.

The moderate Right in France, increasingly “eco-sceptic”, is gung-ho for air-conditioning. They did little to promote it while in power. After the 2003 canicule, the then Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin asked France to give up one day’s holiday to generate funds to modernise retirement homes. The idea fell flat on its face.

The present government supports air-conditioning — in theory. They have done little to equip schools or hospitals. A plan to prepare public buildings to resist extreme heat was cut back to help to reduce the deficit. A state programme to modify homes to resist climate change excludes subsidies for air-conditioning.

The minister for “ecological transition” Monique Barbut had scarcely spoken in public in her eight months in office before last Friday. She then spoke sense — and was savaged from all sides.

“I’m horrified when people say “oh, you just have to put air-conditioning everywhere,” she said. “Do you think that’s going to prevent forest fires? Save crops from being wiped out? Prevent all the deaths of animals that we are seeing?”

The minister’s mistake was to appear to dismiss air-conditioning as pointless or a stop-gap. That is not what people wanted to hear in 40 degrees of heat.

Air-conditioning is fitted to 25 percent of French homes – compared to 90 percent in the US and over 50 percent in Italy and Spain. Two thirds of French offices have air-conditioning but only 40 percent of hospitals and 7 percent of schools.

In truth, the figures are little different in Germany of Britain. We all knew the heat was coming; we failed to prepare for it.

Marine Le Pen’s case is different. She denied that the heat was coming and now blames everyone else for failing to prepare for it.

Air-conditioning is only part of the solution, There are many other things that can be done to defend homes and public buildings against heat. Le Pen ignores that. It’s too complicated.

It is much easier to make people angry by claiming that there is an “ideological” resistance to air-conditioning in France (which is partly true). She said last week: “If I am elected president, I will put into place a massive air-conditioning plan, starting in places with the most vulnerable populations — hospitals, care homes and schools.”

That is a perfectly reasonable idea, even though Le Pen failed to say where she would find the money in France’s chronically overdrawn state accounts. What is NOT reasonable is to deny global warming and then promise to shield people from its consequences.

In 2023 the Rassemblement National mocked and rejected as “propaganda” the sixth report of the IPCC, the international body on climate change which warned that tougher action was needed to reduce carbon emissions.

The RN consistently opposes green legislation in Paris and Brussels. It promises, if elected next year, to reverse or ignore some European legislation on climate change.

The RN insists that it is not climate-sceptic. Some of its politicians may have over-reacted in 2023, it says. The official party-line can be summed up as follows: “there IS a man-made climate problem, but it’s not as acute as some of the experts claim”.

This is sophistry. This is a classic example of the RN’s willingness to say everything and its opposite. It may work in opposition. It is useless in government.

And yet Monique Barbut was pilloried; Marine Le Pen was not.

Few politicians, other than the Left and the Greens, seem willing to address the climate issue before next year’s election. It’s too complicated; too dark; there are too few votes to be won. Air-conditioning is a useful distraction.

The French climatologist Christophe Cassou of the École Normale Supérieure told Le Monde: “My fear is that the presidential election campaign will be reduced to a debate on air-conditioning. Once they have spoken of that, they will think they have spoken about the climate. But they will have spoken of nothing at all.”

Marine Le Pen’s “clim” crusade may seem crass or illogical. It is both. But it is also clever politics. It seizes an issue where the Far Right is confused and cowardly and turns it into a stick with which to beat “the left” and “les elites”.

Voters are spared the need to ponder the real causes of repeated canicules and what sacrifices may be needed to tame them. Instead, they can blame “the government” or “Paris”

Will it work? Probably.