As we write this, France is emerging from a heat wave, or as we prefer to call it, a hot snap. Perhaps because so many young French were recently in the US for the World Cup and posted on social media that the colonists have this wonderful thing called air conditioning, where if it’s too hot outside you make it cooler inside, just as if it’s too cold outside you make it warmer inside with a “furnace”, the French are now demanding it for themselves. In fact there have been near riots in response to AC units being made available at stores. But as we noted above, French politicians and the media have condemned the call for air conditioning as “far right” and anti-environment, although they conveniently exempted EU President Ursula von der Leyen whose offices on the top floors of the Commission HQ were kept pleasantly cool while the air conditioning on the seven floors below were ordered to be shut off to save energy. (These people do not embarrass easily, do they?) The anti-AC logic seems to be that more air conditioning requires more electricity generation which means more greenhouse gases which means more climate crisis. Given that the politicians pushing this logic are also demanding everyone switch to electric cars and heat pumps we could simply ridicule the hypocrisy and be done with it. But we want to refute the argument with numbers, so we start with a simple question: how does France generate its electricity?
For an answer we turned to the Statistical Review of World Energy published annually by the Energy Institute. The data are free to download and in the spreadsheet page called “Elec generation by fuel” row 14 columns J through P we find the data for France in 2025. Converting the reported numbers (in Terawatt-hours) to percentages yields the following:
Nuclear, hydro and renewables (wind and solar) emit virtually no greenhouse gases (at least while operating; construction is another story) and add up to 95 percent of the total. Coal and oil are near zero (less than 0.3 percent each) and natural gas is three percent. So increasing French electricity consumption to power AC units would generate virtually no additional GHG emissions. But it would make the lives of French citizens better and indeed prevent thousands of unnecessary deaths. Elite opposition is deranged.
How deranged? Very. Because even if the power grid were more carbon-intensive, letting the public use AC would make no difference to the world climate while enormously improving public well-being which, one might think, was a key state priority.
OK, that one’s France which for various reasons including geopolitical and geological has been more nuclear-friendly than many European states. So what of others, for instance Britain?
Well, the UK data show that nuclear, hydro and renewables provide about 65 percent of the country’s power while natural gas provides 32 percent. Oil and coal are each under half a percent. So once again the power grid is mostly non-emitting. Yet Britain, not to be outdone on Net Zero mania, is not merely preventing AC from being installed but demanding existing AC units be dismantled.
Europe is a hot mess and we wish them well in straightening it out. Maybe talk to some “football” fans returning from the World Cup about this marvellous American innovation, barely 120 years old.
Britain has the ultra-militant climate activist (and total lunatic), Ed Milliband, in charge of making us 'green' and getting to net zero. Thankfully he will be reshuffled once the change in Prime Minister happens later this month.