Sir Winston would say: “this is nonsense up with which I will not put.”

The Telegraph reported authorities told people to open windows instead of using wonderful window air conditioners and that “passive cooling” options such as shading windows should be prioritised before air-con is considered.

On Wednesday, June 24, 2026, France had it’s hottest day ever on record. Here is a map from CNN showing high temperatures forcast earlier that day: It’s just as bad in France where one of the Ministers (equivalent to our cabinet secretaries) is the Minister of Ecological Transition, one Monique Barbut. (sic?) (Bar Butt… Really?)

Barbut is definitely not on board with letting the peasants have air conditioning. Figaro includes some extensive quotes from Barbut:

She says of herself that she is “horrified by people who tell her that all we need to do is put air conditioning everywhere.” For her, “it’s not a question of adaptation, but rather a measure that is appropriate only for an emergency.” . . . Barbut added, as what she thought was the definitive argument, that air conditioning would not “avoid any forest fires.”

Figaro includes its own editorial in its front page spread. Excerpt:

[Barbut] is an activist disguised as a Minister. . . . Barbut’s words are neither scientific nor ecological; they are religious. For her as for the other fanatics who confound care of the world with their own ideological agenda, the unquestioned climatic heating is not a phenomenon to which societies should adapt, but rather a punishment that we must collectively accept. . . . For them it is a question of atoning for our sins. . . . For such people to have a place in our Council of Ministers is a grave political mistake.

Meanwhile, the anti-immigration party called Rassemblement National has spotted an obvious opening. That party’s leader, Marine Le Pen, has recently called for a “major plan” to generalize air conditioning throughout the country. On the other side of the aisle, the most prominent leader of the Left in France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was quoted by Le Monde on June 20, “We must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere; that would only make things worse.”

Somehow the Left has gone from being the advocate of the working class, to seeking to punish the working class. Why, I cannot explain.

Here in the U.S., between May and September 2024, Phoenix, Arizona, had a streak of more than one hundred days in a row where the temperature went over 100 degrees every day. That city could barely exist without universal air conditioning. The same applies for all the big cities in Texas, Florida, and plenty of other states. I wonder how Barbut or Mélenchon would seek to punish the people who live in those places.

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