France sizzles through its hottest day on record, and the AC divide deepens. Meanwhile, Britain congratulates itself on NHS heatwave plans that keep the sickrooms cool. But this is no time for ministerial smugness. The real crisis is intellectual: we have traded resilience for air-conditioning, and called it progress.
Consider Versailles. In 1788, the French nobility sipped iced drinks while the peasantry starved in the fields. The heatwave that preceded the Revolution was not just meteorological; it was a symptom of systemic rot. Today, our AC units are the new chinoiserie: a fragile luxury masking a civilisational decline. The British establishment clings to the NHS as a secular church, yet its walls are paper-thin against the climate that is coming.
The ‘heatwave plans’ are Victorian in spirit: they manage symptoms, not causes. We open the windows of the hospital while the house of the state is on fire. The real question is whether we have the stomach to retrofit our cities, our economy, and our very habits of thought. The answer, I suspect, is no. We will install more fans, erect more temporary shelters, and pretend that the thermometer is the problem. It is not. The problem is decadence: an inability to imagine a future that is not simply the present with better air conditioning.
So let the French sweat. Let the British congratulate themselves. History is watching. And it has a nasty habit of turning the heat up.
