The US Army used to say A/C was “ not considered appropriate” for bases in Europe, except in Italy, in part an attempt to live like the locals. That is changing as summer temperatures rise. Those cool nights-average summer lows of 60 degrees-have made A/C at home seem unnecessary. Paris, for example, has a summer temperature pattern that’s closer to Seattle than any other American city.
ARMY EYE PRO REGULATION MOVIE
There are several reasons A/C adoption, at least on the northern part of the continent, has remained the province of corporate offices, movie theaters, and luxury stores.įirst is that this summer’s heat is historically quite rare. “They have it in the car, they have it in the office,” he notes, and yet, “air conditioning is considered a luxury product.” He means both practically-there’s a 20 percent tax on A/C in France, compared to 5 percent for a new heating system-and in cultural perception, where Bourquin feels A/C has been unfairly vilified by left-wing environmentalists. “When the French can’t pay for something, they’ll find 10,000 excuses,” counters Gilles Bourquin, who runs the A/C company his father started in 1967, Clim Denfert. Every European who has visited the United States has a story about freezing in an air-conditioned shop or office. Most of that can be called the cultural argument against A/C, and it’s alive and well. It keeps you inside and it creates nonstop arguments with the team at work. It makes you sick, and it gives you a headache. When I asked a French friend why her compatriots resist A/C, she explained: “It pollutes, it’s often too cold, the air is fake. The top two reasons cited were energy costs and environmental impacts. It’s a frightening example of how two different but related climate change events can compound, with each making it harder to respond to the other.īut what explains the longer-term A/C resistance? In a 2021 OpinionWay poll of 1,045 French adults (conducted, it must be said, for a company that makes heat pumps), almost two in three respondents said they did not plan to buy an air conditioner. The drought has reduced the output of France’s nuclear plants and is threatening shipping on the Rhine River, which brings fuel and other material to Germany’s industrial heartland. To make matters worse, the summer is also one of the driest on record. Even before Russia attacked Ukraine, EU electricity rates were more than twice the US average, while incomes there are lower. Air conditioning makes up just 1 percent of building energy use in Europe, compared to 10 percent in the United States. With EU member states trying to cut winter gas use by 15 percent this winter to avoid blackouts or industrial shutdowns-and with one eye on Paris Agreement emissions targets by 2030-putting millions of new A/Cs on the grid just isn’t an option right now. If it seems like a counterintuitive response to a heat wave, that’s because Europe is simultaneously in the midst of a huge energy crunch as Russia throttles the continent’s natural gas supplies. In Spain, for example, the government this week began requiring that A/C in public places be set no lower than 80 degrees-following similar measures in Italy and Greece. Instead of using the moment to embrace A/C, European leaders have mostly shunned the technology or moved to limit its use. Why have some of the world’s wealthiest countries been so slow to adopt hot-weather climate control? It’s a question that’s top of mind once again as another heat wave bakes Western Europe this week. Just one in 10 households in Europe has A/C, far below the rates in China, Japan, or the United States, where 90 percent of households have a cooling system.
ARMY EYE PRO REGULATION INSTALL
Fighting with his neighbors to install a new one that pumps hot air into the street? Fat chance. His antiquated, water-hungry system simply costs too much to bother repairing, he said. “We’re heating up the planet, you’ve got to put it everywhere,” he said. Rizzi insists he is pro-air conditioning. It’s a choice that holds the weird secret of Europe’s reluctance to embrace air conditioning, a blend of culture, climate, architecture, regulation, and foreign policy that leaves some of the richest people on the planet sweating through their clothes for a few weeks each summer. Never mind that there’s condensation on his patrons’ wine glasses, or that it’s going to be this hot or worse every day this week. Rizzi makes note of that, but decides, for now, not to fix it. Three in the afternoon, 91 degrees, and the air conditioning is broken at Les Argentiers, the brasserie that Ivan Rizzi runs on a workaday street in Paris’ 12th Arrondissement. This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Parisians cool off in the Trocadero fountain near the Eiffel Tower on July 19, a day temperatures in the city hit 104F.