France Is Too Hot for Shutters and Ceiling Fans - The Atlantic

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On a recent morning partway through France’s historic heat wave, Dhafer Kahri, an air-conditioning technician, let me join him on a house call to an apartment in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, where he was trying to bring a unit back to life. Kahri’s phone rang so often—several times an hour, all day long—that he worked with his AirPods in. With more work than he could handle, he could freely apologize with the magic words The boss won’t do it for rejecting jobs that he, the boss, didn’t want to do. He wanted to work on apartments with balconies, such as this one, because a balcony is in many cases the only spot an air conditioner can be installed here—hidden from neighbors, preservationists, and the city. He did not want to work on the city’s famous gray zinc roofs, which can reach temperatures of 150 degrees on the hottest summer days, creating life-threatening heat for those who live beneath them.<br>The position of the French government, and the city of Paris, is that air-conditioning is a “maladaptation” to climate change—a wasteful, antisocial technology that intensifies the very crisis that it purports to address.<br>But the national consensus underlying that position is beginning to melt as record-breaking heat tests France’s patience and principles. On Tuesday, the country recorded the hottest day in its history. Then again on Wednesday. Thursday was the same. The high temperature in Paris has been more than 96 degrees for 10 straight days, topping out at 105 this week.<br>Beth Gardiner: Europe’s come-to-AC moment<br>France has been slow to recognize that many buildings need stronger medicine than shutters, ceiling fans, and a good night breeze—and they need it now. This has left the country exposed on multiple fronts. The far right has capitalized on the present social breakdown—closed schools, canceled trains, overloaded hospitals—to proclaim itself the party of air-conditioning, turning a complicated technical question into a culture-war cudgel. Meanwhile, in the absence of clear and easy guidance, air-conditioning is proliferating through French cities in its worst forms—in many cases, a tube spilling scorching air out of an open door or window—as desperate residents adopt inefficient or illegal solutions. Finally, and most important, underestimating the need for AC has left millions of people suffering through the hottest days of their lives with no recourse.

To survive without AC during a heat wave demands a prolonged state of environmental hypervigilance, right as the heat cuts short your sleep and saps your good sense. Since the current heat wave began 10 days ago, the French have been living like sailors, internalizing the rhythms of wind and sun as they rig their homes each day. Their windows close in the morning before they commute, locking in the dawn air. The lucky ones have shutters or awnings, but others must climb stepladders to hang sheets or tablecloths from windows. The hardware stores are all sold out of chalk powder, which can be pasted onto the outside of panes to reflect more sunlight. At night they open the windows, turn on the fans, and take a cold shower. The word for this makeshift adaptation is bricolage, meaning “DIY” or “patch job,” and depending on the context, it is invoked as proof of ingenuity and agility, or evidence of a disgraceful lack of preparedness.<br>That approach worked well enough during other recent heat waves. But this month’s prolonged stretch of nighttime heat has made the practice ineffective. On Wednesday night, for example, the temperature in Paris dipped below 80 degrees for only a few minutes, at dawn. Furthermore, a bricolage approach is most agreeable when you leave during the day, but many French people have had to work from their dark, warm apartments while they care for children whose schools have closed because of the heat.<br>France’s lack of air-conditioning has been somewhat exaggerated by American pundits. Most white-collar offices are air-conditioned, along with many movie theaters, malls, supermarkets, and shops. Nevertheless, it is true that the French—like Europeans more generally—are skeptical of air-conditioning at home. In a 2021 OpinionWay survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents said that they did not have AC and did not plan to install it, mostly for economic or environmental reasons. More abstract, there is a widespread belief (or there was, before this summer) that AC is a wasteful and distinctly American indulgence. Why not dress down, hydrate, or have lunch in the shade?<br>Those sentiments have created, and in turn been reinforced by, rules that discourage the technology. In the country’s road map to adapt to global warming, individual air conditioners are presented as harmful. The roots of this position lie in the energy crisis of the 1970s, which prompted most of Europe to tighten its codes so that buildings would be more efficient. That’s been a...