French Heatwaves: A Battle Over Air Conditioning, Freedom, and Control

The mercury tops 40C for days on end. So what do you do? Actually, that’s a trick question. I don’t really care what you do – and you shouldn’t care what I do, either. My body, my choice. It’s amazing how quickly that principle becomes negotiable when a liberticidal agenda of mass conformity and control is afoot.

Personally, it’s simple. When France turns into a blazing inferno, as it has multiple times in the past two decades that I’ve been here, I just fire up my portable air conditioners. End of story. No philosophical symposium required. I couldn’t care less what everyone else around here is doing, and I don’t require their moral endorsement to remain conscious through August.

And I certainly don’t turn on the TV to see what the French government is going to do to fix the situation. Because their idea of doing something about it mostly consists of badmouthing air conditioning and trying to ideologically mindbend people about their lack of need for it. Their logic being that resisting this modern tool that has saved countless lives will actually ensure that the Earth is kept cooler in the long run than if everyone was running A/C on decarbonized French nuclear power. Right – because that’s worked out well for them so far. “We’re not banning A/C. We’re making sure future summers need it less,” the French Foreign Affairs ministry wrote on social media in response to a critic. In other words, you’re free to not have it, and we’ll crush you into making that choice permanent.

French regulations don’t need to ban A/C when they penalize and massively financially disincentivize the installation of it in everything from private homes to commercial buildings, citing aesthetic rules regarding their facades. It’s such a European solution. Don’t forbid, just make it prohibitively inconvenient and socially unacceptable. So the French government denying an outright ban is like when they tried to say during the Covid-19 fiasco that the jab wasn’t mandatory, but in reality you couldn’t work, go to the gym, or participate in polite society without it.

I’m done trying to educate people over their ludicrous A/C fears. About how the cold air won’t actually hurt your neck. Or how it won’t make you sick. Or how it won’t somehow cost more to your pocketbook and to the environment than your gas-guzzling heating bills or family road trips. Europeans will happily roast chestnuts over a fossil-fuel fire all winter, but a summer breeze from a zero-carbon cool air compressor is apparently where they draw the line. But do what you want. I’ll do the same.

In other words, stop trying to force your magical groupthink on everyone. And instead let people live as they see fit – a concept that used to be considered progressive before progressives became a bunch of scolds and control freaks. This includes freedom for people in care homes and hospitals, where climate control is a baseline for dignity, not the luxury that ideologues make it out to be. Stories like the one where a French man attempted to install a portable unit in his elderly mom’s inferno of a hospital room – only to be ordered to remove it because there weren’t enough to go around – is just more evidence that this is about forcing the average person to settle for less in life, dressed up as fairness.

And if you have a problem with that, then the left wants you to blame yourself, or to blame others who refuse to play along. Blame anyone but them. To wit, Audrey Pulvar, Paris’ Socialist Deputy Mayor, addressed Americans who were stunned at France’s vilification of a standard household appliance that’s now a main staple of homes around the world. “As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, you bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing,” she wrote.

Nah, actually, France refusing to recognize the benefits of climate control is the cause of your consequences – specifically, of hundreds of people dying from the heat because you’ve somehow convinced them that if they just suffer it out, things will improve in the long run. That is, if your idiotic advice doesn’t claim their life first.

All these vulnerable people that the establishment was so eager to save at all costs from Covid-19 by destroying basic freedoms and livelihoods can now just quietly die for the planet, I guess. It also has the added bonus of freeing up the establishment elites to enlarge their own unfettered carbon footprint. Like when the European Commission recently ordered the shut off of that morally pesky air conditioning during the recent extreme heat, but only for the least elite elites in the building – the staffers on the lower floors. Not for the Commissioners’ offices or Queen Ursula’s living and working quarters on the 13th floor of Brussels’ Berlaymont building, of course.

This is about control and freedom where it actually matters. Climate, like Covid, is really just a useful pretext to herd all the sheep into willing compliance. The real acclimatization here is to a backslide. And, like during Covid, every European regardless of heat tolerance needs to defend everyone else’s right to choose their own climate control – whether at home, or in a care facility, or in hospital. Because once the acceptable level of discomfort becomes a public policy question, then you’d better believe that it isn’t going to stop there.

You don’t have to be pro-heat or pro-cool – just anti-authoritarian amid this seasonal absurdity.