Air conditioning creates political division in France

2026-06-24 17:21:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

With temperatures rising sharply, France is being forced to reconsider its long-held reservations about a potential response to climate change: air conditioning.

This week the debate over air conditioning has erupted again, with Marine Le Pen of the populist right calling for a massive subsidized rollout and the traditionally hostile Greens admitting that installing some air conditioning may now be inevitable.

The country currently has low usage, with only 25% of households equipped with an air conditioning unit. In Spain and Italy the figure is 50%, and in the US and Japan 90%.

French hospitals and schools are also sparsely equipped. Thousands of schools have been forced to close this week, and medical and nursing staff are complaining about conditions that are rapidly becoming intolerable.

But with temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius - Tuesday was the hottest day ever recorded in France - there has been a rush to buy portable air conditioning units, just so children can enjoy a few hours in class, or apartment dwellers can suffocate to make it through the night.

And increasingly, it seems, air conditioning's early opponents - mostly on the environmentalist left - are accepting that it is destined to be part of the country's response to global warming.

This week, the leader of the Ecologist party, Marie Tondelier, broke a kind of taboo when she said that air conditioning would be needed in schools and hospitals.

"There are places where we just can't do without it right now," she said.

Her break with what she called "anti-climate dogma" is significant, because until now the Green movement in France has considered air conditioning as the worst solution to climate change.

Far from attacking the root causes of global warming, activists said, the use of climate mitigation methods was simply mitigating the effects of global warming.

And by making those effects more bearable, it distracted attention from the essential fight against the causes.

Not only that, but air conditioning is often criticized by environmentalists for worsening climate change.

This is because it requires electricity to operate - and although most of France's electricity comes from nuclear power, elsewhere this means more fossil fuels are burned.

There is also the issue of refrigerants used in air conditioning, which are greenhouse gases and often leak.

And there is the urban warming effect, caused by the release of hot air into the streets.

The debates are fierce, but some studies suggest that this could raise temperatures in the city by two or three degrees.

Doubt about air conditioning has also permeated government policy.

New building and renovation standards quite naturally focus on insulation, greenery, and high-tech methods of air circulation - with the express purpose of making air conditioning unnecessary.