Paris swelters. The mercury hits 42°C, the hottest day in French history. And what do we get? Not a national call for resilience. Not a sober reflection on climate adaptation. No. We get a political divide over air conditioning. A schism as deep as the one between Rome and Constantinople, fought not with swords but with thermostats and smug moralising.
The French left, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that air conditioning is a bourgeois indulgence. A crime against the planet. They would rather citizens sweat through tropical nights than sully their socialist consciences with a blast of chilled air. Meanwhile, the British government, ever the panicked parent, scrambles to review its heatwave planning. They will likely produce a white paper. They will appoint a tsar. They will do everything except admit that in a warming world, air conditioning is not a luxury: it is a necessity.
This is the great irony. The very people who preach the gospel of climate adaptation are the ones who moralise against the most obvious tool for surviving a heatwave. They would have us believe that suffering is virtuous. That discomfort is ecological. That we should all just open a window and drink iced tea. This is the intellectual decadence of a society that has forgotten what real crisis looks like. In the Victorian era, we built sewers and pumped clean water. Today, we argue about whether cooling is ethical.
Look at the data. Heat kills more people in Europe than any other weather-related disaster. The 2003 heatwave claimed 70,000 lives. And yet, we treat air conditioning as a mark of shame. The green elite, cosy in their stone cottages with thick walls and shaded gardens, tell the urban poor to just put up with it. They would deny the flat-dweller in a concrete block the same relief they themselves enjoy through passive design.
This is not about the environment. It is about class. It is about the ancient human urge to tell others how to live. The French politician who sneers at AC has likely never spent a summer in a high-rise in the banlieue. The British civil servant drafting the heatwave strategy has probably never sat in a south-facing office that turns into a sauna by 3pm.
What we need is a dose of reality. Air conditioning is not going away. It will become as ubiquitous as heating. The challenge is not to ban it, but to make it efficient. To power it with renewables. To design cities that need less of it. But no. We prefer the theatre of moral purity. We prefer to divide ourselves into the virtuous and the profligate.
So here is my prediction: in twenty years, air conditioning will be everywhere. The political squabbles will be forgotten. And those who opposed it will be remembered as the Luddites of the climate age. The fall of Rome was not caused by barbarians at the gates, but by internal rot. Our rot is the inability to accept practical solutions. We would rather posture than build. We would rather argue than adapt.
The heatwave will pass. The politics will remain. And Britain will produce another report. The only question is whether we will learn before the next heatwave kills again.
