Another (Expected) Deadly Heat Wave Hits Europe, With Some Beginning to Doubt the Green Left's Dogmatic Opposition to Air Conditioning

Europe is so beaten by the heat that they're willing to entertain embracing the unfashionable American preference for air-conditioning.

How will they reverse their decades-old determination to let the elderly die in heat waves?

As the BBC shows us: Simple! They'll now say that air conditioning is a sad but necessary response to global warming!

Air conditioning creates political divide after France records hottest day

With temperatures soaring, France is being forced to re-think its longstanding reservations about one possible answer to climate change: air-con.

This week debate about la clim (climatisation) has once again burst out, with Marine Le Pen on the populist right urging a mass subsidised roll-out and traditionally hostile Greens conceding that some air-conditioning may now be inevitable.

Currently the country has a low take-up, with only 25% of households equipped with an air-con unit. In Spain and Italy the figure is 50%, and in the US and Japan 90%.

French hospitals and schools are also only rarely equipped. Thousands of schools have had to shut this week, and medical and nursing staff complain of conditions fast becoming intolerable.

But with temperatures nudging 40C - Tuesday was France's hottest day on record - there has been a rush to buy portable air-conditioning appliances, just to let children enjoy a few hours in class, or for suffocating apartment-dwellers to make it through the night.

And more and more, it seems, long-standing opponents of air-conditioning - mainly on the environmentalist left - recognise that it is bound to be part of the country's response to global warming.

This week the head of the Ecologists party Marine Tondelier broke something of a 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 now," she said.

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

Germany also doesn't have "air con" in hospitals, including in cardiac care units, where you'd think a hospital would want patients to be as stress-free as possible.

In fact, in Germany, they're telling family members of heart attack victims to bring in their own ice-packs for patients recovering from a coronary.

Frenchies are "storming" stores to buy the last few air conditioning units in the country.

Shoppers desperate to escape Europe's brutal heat wave stormed a French store for air conditioners and fans, shoving and scrambling for the last cooling units.

The chaotic scenes unfolded this week at a store in Chambray-les-Tours, where dozens of people waited outside before rushing through the doors as the security shutter rolled open, according to The Sun.

Footage on social media shows shoppers elbowing their way through the crowd and clambering over one another to snatch portable air conditioners and fans from the shelves.

Within seconds, the display had been stripped nearly bare.

The buying frenzy comes as much of Western Europe swelters through a record-breaking heat wave that has pushed temperatures above 104 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of France, Spain, and neighboring countries.

The extreme heat has already taken a deadly toll.

French Sports Minister Marina Ferrari posted on X that at least 55 people have drowned across France as residents sought relief from the soaring temperatures in rivers, lakes and other waterways.

Among the most heartbreaking cases was the death of a 3-year-old boy who became trapped inside a family car in Saint-Gratien, outside Paris, on Wednesday, authorities said.

The child climbed into the vehicle after his father told him to take a nap, but the car's child-lock system engaged, trapping him inside as outside temperatures climbed above 85 degrees.

He was discovered about 45 minutes later but could not be revived.

They're limiting sales of alcohol to try to reduce the rates of heat-related hospitalizations:

"We are reaching a saturation point in hospital facilities," Paris police chief Patrice Faure said Thursday.

This is pure European neofeudalism: The EU commission wants to show that its doing its part to reduce "global warming" by turning off AC in part of the building.

Specifically, the eight lower floors where the plebes work.

The top seven floors where the elites work will have full AC:

Pieter Cleppe @pietercleppe

The EU Commission in Brussels has shut off airco, but only for the lower floors, where the lower ranks work:

"It's like feudalism," a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on. A second official agreed it was a "disgrace."

The European Commission's headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave.

Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: "BERL -- URGENT -- Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day."

The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners' offices are housed on floors eight or above.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:31 PM

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