As Europe Braces for Another Heat Wave, the Fight Over Air Conditioning Heats Up

PARIS—“With the amount of taxes the French pay, it is incomprehensible that we are living like in an underdeveloped country,” Joséphine (pseudonym) told The Epoch Times on July 5.Her mother-in-law is at Lariboisière Hospital in Paris, recovering from a facial infection of unknown origin, in a room she says climbed past 108 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer’s first heat wave.As a second heat wave settled over the country and much of Western Europe, she called it “absolutely shameful” that the hospital is not fully air-conditioned and said that hospitals, of all places, should be beyond the reach of France’s argument over cooling.This account illustrates a broader debate that has been taking place across Europe as it grapples with high temperatures this summer.The World Health Organization has linked more than 1,300 deaths across the continent to the heat wave that began on June 21, and France’s national health agency recorded around 1,000 more deaths than expected after June 24, most of them among people over 65.Paris exceeded 104 degrees Fahrenheit during the last heat wave at the end of June, and should reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit over the weekend.Following mounting criticism, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said on June 29 that the government had ordered 30,000 air conditioning units for hospitals, with deliveries expected to begin within days.The investment was welcomed but deemed insufficient by the National Union of Nursing Professionals, which pointed out the existence of “390,000 hospital beds across 2,900 public and private healthcare facilities,” and “610,000 residents in 7,400 nursing homes.”However, the heat strained far more than hospitals. Schools closed across Western Europe, some factories cut output, and rail service was suspended as tracks and overhead lines struggled in the heat.Europe remains one of the least air-conditioned wealthy regions in the world. Estimates suggest as few as 3 percent of British homes have cooling, against roughly one-quarter of French homes, more than 40 percent of Spanish ones, and around 90 percent of American ones.Lariboisière Hospital in Paris on July 5, 2026. Etienne Fauchaire/The Epoch TimesIn France, only about 7 percent of school facilities are currently air-conditioned, and fewer than 10 percent of rooms in residential care facilities for older adults are cooled, a portion that has barely changed since 2020.The reasons are cultural, architectural, and regulatory as much as climatic. Much of the continent’s housing was designed for a climate where periods of intense heat were relatively rare.Some Europeans also came to see cooling units as noisy, energy-hungry, and unsightly against historic facades.In Paris, a unit visible from the street can be refused by officials guarding the limestone facades of 19th-century buildings, and installations often require the approval of the entire co-ownership.Under French rules, a building association can block a system judged too noisy, a frequent trigger for neighbor disputes.The disputes are not only political. French courts can treat a modest increase in noise as an actionable nuisance between neighbors, and cooling systems have spawned a growing body of litigation in cities such as Paris.The rear of the Opéra Garnier in Paris, framed by buildings reflecting the iconic Haussmann architectural style of the 19th century, on July 5, 2026. Etienne Fauchaire/The Epoch TimesMany French officials take a dim view of air conditioning, including members of President Emmanuel Macron’s government. Ecology and Biodiversity Minister Monique Barbut, a former head of WWF France, an environmentalist lobbying group, said during the heat wave that she was “horrified” by calls to install cooling everywhere.“I am horrified by people who tell me we just have to put air conditioning everywhere,” she said. “Do you think that is going to prevent a forest fire? Do you think that is going to keep a crop from failing? Do you think that is going to prevent the deaths of the animals we are seeing?”Critics answered that no one claims cooling stops wildfires, and that the case for it rests on protecting people in overheated hospitals, care homes, schools, and apartments. The mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, a conservative, called her remarks scientifically baseless, noting the direct link between the absence of cooling and both shuttered schools and endangered hospital patients.When it comes to the environmental case against air conditioning, some experts say it is weaker than often portrayed, particularly in France, where electricity is among the cleanest in Europe.Grid operator RTE reported that about 95 percent of French electricity was low-carbon in 2025, with a carbon intensity below 20 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour—among the lowest in the world.“The air conditioning runs on electricity, and electricity in France is decarbonized, fed by nuclear and hydropower,” French physicist François Gervais told The Epoch Times on July 9.A former research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research, the second-largest research organization in the world, and a former expert reviewer of the U.N. climate panel’s AR5 and AR6 reports, Gervais said that a cooling unit “works like a heat pump,” draws little power, and that the ecological objection in France is therefore hard to justify.Critics, therefore, say that the opposition to air conditioning is driven less by environmental science than by an ideological commitment among many environmentalists to degrowth.On July 1, Kévin Messy, a right-wing district councilor in Paris, put forward a proposal to install air conditioning in homes and schools. The proposal was rejected by the council.“On the left, and especially in Paris, where the governing majority is an alliance of the Communist Party, the Greens, and the Socialist Party, the debate has been skewed by the ‘watermelons,’ those politicians who are green on the outside, but red on the inside. They believe that adapting to climate change would weaken the will to fight it,” he told The Epoch Times. “At heart, they don’t follow the science and are just advocates of degrowth,” he said.Parisians relax in the shade along the banks of the Seine to escape the heat on July 5, 2026. Etienne Fauchaire/The Epoch TimesA post on X by Messy drew widespread attention after he noted that his municipal government had installed outdoor air-conditioning units visible on the building façade, even though such installations on Parisian buildings were prohibited under the Paris Bioclimatic Local Urban Plan adopted in November 2024.In addition, the Communist Party introduced a proposal to requisition all air-conditioned spaces during heat waves.“Heat wave episodes are becoming more frequent. We are not all equal in the face of phenomena like this. We need to better share cool places,” said Ian Brossat, a Communist senator and Paris city councilor, proposing “a form of climate requisition.”Messy disagreed.“The left says one thing and its opposite. It rejected air-conditioning for elderly homes and schools. Yet its own members install air-conditioning for themselves, and now want to requisition privately owned air-conditioned spaces on the grounds that it is wrong for capitalists to profit from them,” he said.“This is nothing less than an attack on private property. Communists doing communism,” he added.In France, a parallel debate over assisted dying thrust air conditioning into the spotlight. As the bill advanced through the National Assembly during the heat wave, Renaissance deputy Jean-François Rousset, a former surgeon in President Macron’s governing bloc, urged colleagues to move faster, saying people were “dying in torrid heat” and had “to be helped.”The remark drew outrage from opponents describing what they criticized as an ironic situation where the same governing coalition had not equipped France’s hospitals, care homes, and schools with the cooling that might have eased those very patients’ suffering.In Europe, the dispute has hardened along partisan lines. National Rally leader Marine Le Pen has called for a major national cooling plan for hospitals, care homes, schools, and public transport, saying that a “right to coolness” is a matter of public health.Meanwhile, France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon said on June 19: “We absolutely must not do that. Air conditioning everywhere means increasing climate damage.”As in France, environmental building rules have fueled recurring debates in the UK. Under current regulations, air conditioning can be installed, but developers must first prioritize passive cooling measures for new homes, such as window coverings and cross ventilation, before turning to active cooling systems. Planning permission is also required in certain cases, including for flats, leasehold properties, and shared buildings. At the end of May, Claire Coutinho, the UK’s shadow energy secretary, criticized the country’s building regulations in a video posted on X, saying they “are blocking Brits from enjoying the cool air that you could have had almost anywhere else in the world.”“That’s why we’d overturn the building regulations, end the air conditioning ban, and make Britain cool again,” she said. On June 24, social media users and some British conservative politicians reacted strongly to a Telegraph report that council planning officers had ordered residents in Camden to remove an air conditioning unit because it did not comply with regulations favoring non-air-conditioning methods of cooling.Camden Council did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.Simple seasonal maintenance, like replacing air filters and clearing debris around outdoor units, can help homeowners keep air conditioning systems running efficiently all summer long. Dreamstime/TNSThe UK’s own Climate Change Committee has called heat the deadliest single climate-related health threat in the country and urged the government to fund active cooling in care homes, schools, and hospitals, most of which have none. More than 1,000 British schools closed during the last heat wave in June.The pattern repeats across the continent, shaped by local rules.In Switzerland, cantonal energy law can subject even a single home installation to strict approval, and in Geneva, the strictest canton, or state, residents have had to prove a genuine need for a fixed unit, sometimes with a doctor’s note, though officials signaled during the record heat that they might loosen the rules.Beyond the electricity that cooling units consume, environmentalists have also said that their use should be limited because the units rely on refrigerant gases, which they said are potent greenhouse gases.Gervais said the refrigerant argument was overstated.“This cannot be repeated often enough, because the media do not report it: Water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas. The slight warming, less than one degree, that we have seen since the beginning of the century is due to the effects of water vapor and cloud cover,” he told The Epoch Times.Gervais puts carbon dioxide’s contribution to “warming” since 1850 at about one-third of a degree Celsius, pointing to natural cycles, including a roughly 60-year cycle described by physicist Nicola Scafetta, as the main drivers.“There is indeed an effect from CO2, but it is truly negligible: 0.33 degrees Celsius. The fact that so much fuss is made over such a negligible impact is, from a scientific point of view, completely surreal,” he said.Those views place him at odds with scientists who contend that primarily human activity drives “climate change.”The politics have also crossed the Atlantic. As some American commentators mocked Europe and France for the lack of cooling, the deputy mayor of Paris, Audrey Pulvar, fired back on Instagram.“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, adding that America’s cities, “90% air conditioned,” were “not unrelated to this.”In Washington, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, publicly refuted the idea that American cooling was to blame for Europe’s heat.Questioning the narrative that links individual human activity to changes in climate, Zeldin said on Fox News that “the climate has always been changing,” adding: “There is no more hoax where we say that the world is about to end. We are no longer, in the name of climate change, passing out tens of billions of dollars to well-connected left-wing friends.”Many conservative politicians across Europe take a different approach. Rather than rejecting the claim that human activity contributes to climate change, they advocate nuclear energy and air conditioning as practical tools for both reducing emissions and adapting to rising temperatures.“In France, most on the right argue that we need both to mitigate climate change and adapt to it through measures such as air conditioning and nuclear energy,” Messy said. “The left, by contrast, focuses almost exclusively on fighting climate change while rejecting the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting both nuclear power and air conditioning as effective responses.”“This shows they are actually pursuing a degrowth agenda, using climate change as a pretext rather than sincerely fighting it,“ the Paris district councilor said.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) considers nuclear energy to be a low-carbon source of electricity because of its very low lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions. In its most recent assessment of climate change adaptation in Europe, the UN body also identified air conditioning as one of the most effective measures for reducing the health impacts of heat waves, ranking it ahead of mechanical ventilation and well ahead of urban greening strategies.Parisians on the terrace of Café des Beaux Arts on July 5, 2026. During hot weather, many residents spend time at outdoor cafés. Etienne Fauchaire/The Epoch TimesFor Gervais, the alarm surrounding heat waves obscures a longer historical perspective. He noted severe heat waves in Western Europe well before the sharp rise in fossil fuel consumption. Weather, he said, is inherently chaotic and unpredictable, and Europe would be better served by preparing for extreme heat rather than assuming future summers will be mild.In the meantime, the human stakes are immediate. Back in her mother-in-law’s hospital room, Joséphine, who spoke to The Epoch Times pseudonymously, said she could no longer contain her frustration as temperatures climbed once again.“You should see the conditions the elderly are enduring in this hospital because of the heat,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking and deeply distressing to witness firsthand.”