A giant new hospital being built in the Brittany city of Nantes for example will have air-conditioning in only half its rooms, provoking the wrath of medical trade unions.
“In the environmental context, we should have la clim’ everywhere,” said Olivier Terrien of the CGT union.
According to Valerie Pécresse, the conservative president of the Paris regional council, “The state operates under an anti-clim’ ideology. But air-conditioning has got to be brought into the picture, along with other methods for creating cool.”
Pécresse, who controls Paris regional transport, hopes to have all buses and trains equipped with aircon by 2032, and she castigates her Socialist predecessor for failing to see its importance.
The political right has always been more pro-clim’ than the left – and none more so than the National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen.
This week she has been calling for a nationwide “plan clim'” to equip all schools and hospitals with air-conditioning.
According to RN spokesman Jean-Philippe Tanguy, the plan would also include government-backed interest-free loans worth €20bn ($22.7bn; £17.2bn) to allow 30 to 40 million householders to install cooling units.
Critics denounced the RN plan as opportunistic and uncosted. They say the populist right was the last to recognise the reality of climate change, so it has little credibility today when it talks about its effects.
But the truth is that with temperatures approaching danger levels in France, with lives at stake and schools and hospitals at risk of breakdown – everyone is coming to the same conclusion: that more clim’ is inevitable.
