It says an awful lot about France - and not in a good way - that there is "political divide" on using air conditioning when temperatures literally exceed those of the Sahara desert, and when France has one of the greenest energy mixes in the world (thanks to nuclear).
And it says even more that those who oppose AC are often the same as those who oppose nuclear: the view - presumably - is that you should neither adapt to climate change (AC) nor prevent it (nuclear).
Also the same people, incidentally, who oppose pesticides and fertilizers - basically modern farming - and push for all-organic: a prescription that, if universally applied, would literally starve billions of people (and, ironically, would require so much additional farmland it would devastate the world's remaining forests).
It's all part of the same logical fallacy, the notion that if something causes a problem, then that thing is the problem.
Yes progress and technology caused and continue to cause plenty of environmental issues. And there is indeed something seductive in saying "we've gone too far, let's change tracks, let's head towards a simpler, slower life, we used to be like that."
But not only is this just not feasible without causing far greater harm to ourselves, it's also a fundamentally nihilistic and mortiferous ideology. One that rests on a profound discomfort with what's arguably the single most defining feature of humanity: our ability to shape our environment to suit us, to fight our circumstances rather than surrender to them. That's been the case ever since we discovered fire and invented farming.
It is, at the end of the day, the transformation of humanity's genius - our need to create and improve our condition - into a vice. They make it sound like a humanistic project but how could it be since the core premise is fear of humans and contempt for our very nature?
Conclusion: yes, 100 times yes, use AC. You'd need to be a complete moron to let yourself boil under 43C heat in order to "save the planet." If climate change is to be solved, it will be by getting the ideologues out of the way of the people who actually fix things.
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