PARIS — Air conditioning isn’t the key to address ever-more-intense heat waves, France’s minister for ecological transition said Tuesday in response to the far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen’s proposal for a “major air conditioning equipment plan.”
“Our issue with air conditioning concerns heating,” Agnès Pannier-Runacher explained, calling air conditioning an “inadequate adaptation” to rising temperatures.
“When you cool a room, you need heat to obtain the cold — which means you’re necessarily heating another area,” the French official told reporters. “You’re heating up the streets, which increases hot spots.”
A 2020 study on air conditioning use in Paris underlined that “if AC systems release heat into the street, as is most often the case, the outside air is warmed and the heat wave worsens,” with an impact of several degrees Celsius depending on how widespread the use is.
“Although it is an efficient solution for households that can afford it, AC makes the situation worse for households who cannot or do not want to adopt it,” the study published in the Environmental Research Letters scientific journal added.
The French have not traditionally been big fans of air conditioning, but the number of French households installing cooling systems is growing.
In a post on X on Monday, Le Pen accused the government of forcing ordinary people to suffer the heat while the “so-called French elites” benefit from air conditioning.
Frédéric Falcon, a lawmaker from Le Pen’s National Rally, said that his party’s goal is to install air conditioners “as widely as possible, in administrations, schools, retirement homes and private homes.”
French authorities have supported supplying strategic buildings and public transport with cooling systems but prioritized other ways of keeping temperatures down that do not emit greenhouse gasses, like planting more trees and better insulating buildings.
The night from Monday to Tuesday was the warmest on record, according to France’s weather service, and Tuesday is expected to be “one of the 10 warmest days ever recorded in France,” with maximum temperatures of up to 41 degrees Celsius in the capital city of Paris.
Giorgio Leali and Aude Le Gentil contributed to this report.
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