As Europe’s heatwave leaves millions sweltering in poorly insulated apartments, schools and retirement homes, more French people are breaking with tradition to turn to air conditioning.
Many in France believe cooling systems are bad for the environment.
But with scientists saying the climate crisis is fuelling increasingly frequent hot spells in France, cooling units are starting to fly off shelves and have even become a hot topic in the run-up to next year’s presidential election.
Matthieu Ruquet, 35, says he was against AC, but his American wife convinced him to buy a portable unit to keep their two-year-old daughter and dog cool after their flat in the Paris suburbs reached 36°C indoors.
When his partner went to the store, there were none left.
“I didn’t grow up with AC,” said the Frenchman from the Mediterranean city of Nice, who said his family coped using fans.
But his mother had, in recent years, bought a unit, and now so was he.
“I think it’s changing,” he said. But “the main problem for me is that buying AC is going to make the planet hotter.”
France on Wednesday experienced its hottest day since measurements began in 1947, the national weather service said.
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‘Isn’t a problem’
Eight in 10 people in France view air-conditioning as environmentally unfriendly, according to a survey of more than 1,000 published earlier this month.
Detractors argue that cooling a room or building is high in energy consumption.
But experts say the impact on the environment depends on the source of the energy consumed to operate it.
“Air conditioning isn’t a problem for the environment today in France,” Francois Gemenne, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expert, told French television this month, as France did not rely that much on fossil fuels for its power.
Nuclear power stations produced almost 70 percent of France’s electricity last year.
Urban planner Clement Gaillard said AC was not problematic as long as it was not used as the only solution.
The real problem was that building designs were not taking the climate crisis into account.
These included modern buildings with large glass windows, or relatively new homes with insulation that worked in winter but not in summer, he said.
