Too ugly, too noisy, too… American? France’s great air con debate

By Camille Knight, Elina Baudier Kim and Lisa Courbebaisse

Paris (CNN) — As France braces for another heatwave, it’s barely recovered from the last one. Meteorologists expect scorching temperatures to return this week, and with them, the same question that was asked repeatedly in June: why won’t France just turn on the air conditioning?

Some people are already taking things into their own hands. Dozens of people lined up outside several Lidl stores across the Paris region on Thursday, all hoping to get their hands on an air conditioning unit. In Aubervilliers, a Paris suburb, the doors gave way under the pressure of the crowd, and fights broke out among shoppers. “I saw people get trampled,” one shopper told Le Parisien newspaper. “I was in shock, I got shoved around in every direction, and unfortunately I didn’t leave with an AC unit,” another said.

Only around 24% of French households have air conditioning according to France’s energy transition agency – up from 18% just two years ago, but still far below the roughly 50% seen in neighboring Italy.

Alexia, a 26-year-old living on the outskirts of Paris, says she caved when she found out another heatwave was on the way. “All the air conditioners I had seen to potentially buy were out of stock. So I rushed to get another one before there was absolutely none left.”

Meanwhile, just 7% of French schools are equipped with AC, and thousands closed their doors last week as temperatures in the classroom became unbearable. With more than 2,000 excess deaths recorded over six days at the peak of the June heat, according to health authorities, France’s cultural resistance to AC has started to soften.

AC has long been viewed by the French as ugly, noisy, unnecessary and – above all – American. There’s also a longstanding French belief that breathing in conditioned air can make you sick. Instead, French building tradition leans on thick stone walls and shuttered windows, passive cooling techniques that worked well enough when summers were milder.

Then there’s the regulation. France’s reputation for red tape and bureaucratic excess very much applies to AC units. In the 19th-century buildings that define Paris’ skyline, residents routinely find themselves denied permission to install exterior condenser units because heritage rules protect the uniform look of the city’s rooftops and facades, most built during Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s grand remodeling of the capital under Napoleon III. Co-owned buildings require approval from the co-ownership body before a fixed unit can go in at all, and installations done without it can be forcibly reversed.

With the 2027 presidential race approaching, air conditioning has become fertile political ground. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally has been the loudest pro-AC voice, calling for a nationwide “plan clim” to equip every school and hospital, and $23 billion in government-guaranteed, interest-free loans to help 30 to 40 million households install units.

On the left, attitudes are split. The Greens, traditionally the fiercest AC skeptics, are shifting ground, with party leader Marine Tondelier acknowledging that cooling is now necessary in at least some schools and hospitals. The leader of the hard-left France Unbowed party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has warned against air conditioning, saying installing it everywhere “means causing more harm.”

The government is somewhere in the middle – approving emergency AC units for hospitals while trying not to be seen as abandoning France’s insulation-first approach to heat. Just how charged the debate has become was clear when the Greens filed a motion of no confidence against the government on Thursday over its heatwave response. The motion is unlikely to pass, but indicates how deeply politicized the issue has become.

Resistance to air conditioning has also been framed in environmental terms, based on the idea that it directly contributes to climate change through the energy it consumes. In France, that argument runs up against the country’s energy mix: roughly 95% of French electricity comes from low-carbon sources, with nuclear power alone supplying around two-thirds. Running an air conditioner off that grid carries a fraction of the carbon cost it would in a country like Poland or Germany, where fossil fuels still make up a much larger share of electricity generation.

Concentrated AC use can raise city temperatures through waste heat. That’s a localized phenomenon, not the same as global warming driven by planet -heating pollution, but it increases inequalities between those with access to AC and those without.

What environmental activists also argue is that the fight has been reduced to a binary of AC versus no AC, focusing the debate on the treatment, not the cause.

But for more and more French people, no matter how much they try individually to combat the causes of climate change, the need to deal with its symptoms has become a necessity.

The-CNN-Wire
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