Air con has become a political hot potato

Times

2 days ago

I've just come back from Vietnam, where it was hot. So hot. Running through my head, often, I'd hear Robin Williams's monologue from Good Morning, Vietnam — which, of course, I watched while there — in which he channels a grunt in the jungle giving a weather report, saying, 'It's hot! Damn hot!' and musing that he could cook a meal in the crotch of his own shorts. 'Fool, I told you again! It's hot! Were you born on the sun?'
In those conditions, you venture out like a moon explorer, boldly embarking on missions to temples and markets, before returning gratefully to the blessing of ubiquitous, essential, air conditioning. It's funny, but they didn't have much air con when I backpacked around Asia in my twenties. I kept telling my kids that, probably quite smugly and boringly. Before, obviously, turning it on.
Back home, it is also hot. Less hot, but still. Is this our third heatwave of 2025, or our fourth? Or fifth? I forget. In France, it has been far hotter. On Wednesday, it was 33C in Paris, and that was relatively low. In Nîmes it was 43C, up there with the Middle East. In France, air con is now a huge political fight.
Earlier this summer, Marine Le Pen announced a 'major air-conditioning equipment plan' if her party ever takes power. In response, her opponents on the left have deemed air conditioning not just pathetic and environmentally dangerous but also fundamentally un-French, like, I suppose, toasters or toilets that have seats.
It fell to the French environment minister to point out that more air con means more energy use, which means more global warming, which means more heatwaves. 'The government wants ordinary people to suffer the heat while the so-called French elites benefit from air conditioning,' retorted Le Pen; a silly populist response rendered somehow all the more maddening for being absolutely true.
As an environmentalist, I know which side of this fight I ought to be on. You might have spotted, though, that I'm the sort of environmentalist who just flew back from a family holiday in Vietnam. My point being, it's best to be honest. Instinctively, I suppose I do still nurse a prejudice that air con is one of those weird things Americans do, like saying 'aluminum' and putting too much ice in drinks. Few things irritate me more than its growing and pointless ubiquity in British hotels, especially when they nail the windows shut.
But would I live in Florida without it? Would you? What's more, I'm naggingly aware that I'm writing this very column in a nice, air-conditioned office, having decided I didn't much fancy a sweaty afternoon at home. Le Pen would have me bang to rights.
• France swelters without air conditioning as chilling out gets political
What this means, depressingly, is that the environmental left's denunciation of air con is two things at once: utterly correct and entirely deranged. You can't possibly tell hot people that they're not allowed to cool down because, if you do, first they'll laugh at you, then they'll hate you, and then they'll ignore you anyway. Just like, when push comes to shove, you're probably ignoring yourself.
Hardly anybody wants to properly champion environmental politics these days. Even the Greens are happier talking about Gaza. Really, it's just Ed Miliband, and I'm sure he does it mainly out of masochism. And yet, despite this, undeniably, we live at a time when climate change is no longer some distant future fear but an actual, identifiable phenomenon we are living through, right now.There are wildfires not only in southern Europe, but also in Edinburgh. There have been weeks of 30-degree weather even in Norway.
This week has brought record temperatures to Croatia, Hungary and Canada. I mentioned earlier that parts of France were now more like the Middle East. To clarify, I meant the old Middle East, not the new one, because that's even worse. In the Jordan Valley next week, they're expecting it to hit 50C. Yes, I know there was a heatwave in 1976 but the hottest ten years on record have all happened in the past decade. The sceptics told us it wouldn't happen. But it is happening, right now.
Once, I suppose, the environmentalist hope was that all of this would eventually bring an epiphany, shocking people and governments into drastic action. In reality, though, the first instinct wins out, and that instinct is to cope. Today, about 90 per cent of American homes have air con, set against about 25 per cent of French homes and a mere 5-ish per cent of British ones. Absolutely, there's an environmental cost to this, as seen in the way that their energy usage is far greater than our own. Yet, will this discrepancy remain should 30-degree plus summers become a European norm? Will we all volunteer, for the future sake of the planet, to live in the crotch of Robin Williams's sweaty shorts? Come on.
• Heatwaves can make you hot-tempered
As it happens, the British politician who may end up doing the most to spread air con in British homes is Miliband himself. In July in parliament, he announced that his department was consulting on expanding existing boiler-replacement grants to include air-to-air heat pumps, which, effectively, are air conditioners, capable of blowing cold as well as hot. In other words, it may well be the ungreen desire to keep cool that makes our home heating as green as it is ever going to be.
Either way, there's a lesson here. Nobody wants to wear a hair shirt when it's frankly too hot to wear any shirt. Having been unelectably right all along, environmentalists should be wary of letting the very circumstances they were warning about make them unelectably wrong. Pretty soon, certainly in France, and perhaps here too, a moral argument against air con will begin to sound every bit as absurd as one against central heating. I'm sorry, but there's just no fighting this. Chill out.