French aversion to air conditioning melts as homes sizzle

“ISN’T A PROBLEM”

Eight in 10 people in France view air-conditioning as environmentally unfriendly, according to a survey of more than 1,000 published earlier this month.

Detractors argue that cooling a room or building is high in energy consumption.

But experts say the impact on the environment depends on the source of the energy consumed to operate it.

“Air conditioning isn’t a problem for the environment today in France,” Francois Gemenne, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expert, told French television this month, as France did not rely that much on fossil fuels for its power.

Nuclear power stations produced almost 70 per cent of France’s electricity last year.

Urban planner Clement Gaillard said AC was not problematic as long as it was not used as the only solution.

The real problem was that building designs were not taking climate change into account.

These included modern buildings with large glass windows, or relatively new homes with insulation that worked in winter but not in summer, he said.

The air conditioning units do have some downsides. They use potentially polluting cooling fluid and reject hot air outside.

This warm air does not heat up the atmosphere on a global scale, but it can locally worsen heat by a few degree decimals to several degrees in densely built, poorly ventilated urban areas, said Vincent Viguie of the International Centre for Research on Environment and Development (CIRED).

A 2025 simulation of a densely populated neighbourhood in the French city of Lyon showed that air conditioners installed on building facades could locally raise the air temperature by 1.75°C.