Nineteen percent of French households have air conditioning. Ninety percent of American households do. And according to one Paris official, that second number is the reason why the climate is heating up globally.
Audrey Pulvar, the Deputy Mayor of Paris, took to social media this week to lecture Americans — during a heat wave in France — about how our love of air-conditioning is raising the number of French people who die every year from heat-related injuries.
The statement came as France and other parts of Europe baked under triple-digit temperatures. The one thing she left out though, but which was probably the trigger for her post was seeing all of the posts from her fellow Europeans visiting the U.S. to catch World Cup matches. Social media has been flooded with videos from European toursists --of which its estimated roughly 1.2 million European tourists are visiting each host city-- espousing how great American air conditioning feels, along with other American concepts like free refills of soda, free chips and salsa at Mexican restaurants, our amazing food options, etc.
Pulvar's post was a direct response to American journalists and social media users who had pointed out that Paris buildings largely lack air conditioning. "Dear American journalists and social media 'influencers': for days, some of you have been criticizing and making fun of Paris because the city does not have A/C in every room. OMG, this is so rich!" Pulvar wrote.
She then got to the real thesis: "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."
So to be clear — a French bureaucrat is arguing that your window unit is creating weather patterns 4,000 miles away, and the solution is for you to sweat more, not for Paris to install compressors.
Pulvar wasn't done. "Your cities '90% air-conditioned' are not unrelated to this," she continued. "In Paris, we take responsibility." She closed with: "If every American city made the same ecological transition efforts as Paris and many European cities, believe me, the whole world would be better off."
Taking responsibility, in this context, means refusing to cool your buildings and then blaming someone else when it's 105 degrees inside them.
Pulvar wasn't the only French official to weigh in. Monique Barbut, France's Minister of Ecology, told reporters, "I'm horrified by people who tell me we just need to put AC everywhere." Horrified. Not by the heat. Not by the elderly who end up in hospitals every summer when this happens. By the suggestion that maybe mechanical cooling is a solved problem.
France has been here before. The 2003 heat wave killed nearly 15,000 people, many of them elderly, in buildings without air conditioning. The policy response was not to install air conditioning. It was to create a national heat wave plan that mostly involves telling people to drink water and go to public cooling centers — which also don't have enough air conditioning.
The irony is that more people die in Europe from heat-related injuries than Americans die from gun violence EVERY YEAR.
Pulvar's argument boils down to a simple formula: We won't cool our buildings because cooling is bad for the planet. The planet is hot because you cool your buildings. Therefore, your comfort is our crisis.
That's not climate policy. That's a neighbor complaining about your garden hose during a drought while refusing to fix their own broken sprinkler.
