So the French have achieved it. That which every climate alarmist warned us about has come to pass, but not in the way they predicted. The Paris canal cooling system, lauded as a triumph of continental eco-engineering, has collapsed under the strain of a red alert heatwave.
The city of light is now a city of sweat, with emergency cooling centres overwhelmed and the elderly dropping like flies. Meanwhile, across the Channel, Britain’s supposedly backward green infrastructure is performing admirably. How delicious, how utterly predictable.
The British have long been mocked for our pragmatic, piecemeal approach to environmental policy. We plant trees, install rainwater harvesting, and upgrade our Victorian sewerage with the quiet determination of a nation that has survived Roman collapse, Viking raids, and the Blitz. The French, by contrast, go for grandiose schemes: canal cooling, nuclear-powered everything, centralised planning.
And when the heat turns up, their house of cards melts. This is not about climate change, dear reader. This is about the intellectual decadence that prizes spectacle over substance.
The Paris canal system was a vanity project, designed to look good in brochures and win plaudits from European technocrats. It never accounted for the reality of a three-week heatwave, because reality is inconvenient for ideologues. Britain’s green infrastructure, on the other hand, is built on centuries of empirical tinkering.
Our allotments, our peat bogs, our network of small reservoirs: they are not sexy. They do not win Nobel Prizes. But they function.
They adapt. They endure. The fall of Paris’s cooling canals should be a wake-up call, but it will not be.
The same intellectuals who sneered at British pragmatism will now demand even more centralised, expensive, and fragile systems. They will call for ‘transformative solutions’ while ignoring the obvious: that resilience lies in decentralisation, local knowledge, and a healthy scepticism for grand plans. I have written before about the parallels between our age and the late Roman Empire, where the provincials built with stone while Rome relied on bread and circuses.
The parallels are now stark. Paris is Rome, feverish and decadent. Britain is the province, steady and sensible.
France is now on red alert. But the real red alert should be against the intellectual vanity that has brought them to this pass. Let the canal cool itself; we have work to do.
