A remarkable feature of governments in Europe is the extent to which they operate explicitly against the interest of their citizens and voters. They give an outward appearance of being democracies, and they hold regular elections, but somehow the people in power are a self-perpetuating political clique that, from all evidence, seems to hold the ordinary working people and voters in complete contempt. Prime examples of operating against the interests of the people include: opening the borders to millions of impoverished migrants who hate the host countries; and imposing a fantasy “energy transition” that drives up the cost of energy and destroys industrial jobs without any measurable effect on the climate.
A new example of the hatred of the governing class for the ordinary people has emerged in the past couple of weeks. You have probably read about the major heat wave that has swept across Europe, affecting all the major countries: UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and others. On Wednesday June 24, France allegedly had its hottest day ever on record. Here is a map from CNN showing high temperatures forecast early that day:
Whether or not the temperature that day actually reached 105 in Paris or 109 in Bordeaux, it was objectively very hot. Meanwhile, American readers may be shocked to learn that the large majority of residences in France do not have air conditioning. A source called hellowatt.fr here says that as of early 2026 only 27.4% of houses and 12.6% of apartments in France had air conditioning. (In the U.S., the figure for all residences exceeds 90%.). So the large majority of the French people were left to swelter through the heat wave. Thousands of schools were also forced to close.
As you might imagine, the experience of the heat wave has set off a debate in France as to whether air conditioning should be more widely adopted. I happen to be in France at the moment (on a family vacation) and picked up a copy of the Sunday edition of one of the national newspapers, Le Figaro. Its entire front page is devoted to the air conditioning controversy. (It’s mostly behind paywall. Here is a link to read the first several paragraphs (in French).).
Figaro commissioned a polling organization called Odoxa-Backbone to survey attitudes of the French toward expanding access to air conditioning. Excerpt (my translation):
The French favor a grand plan for air conditioning. 8 of 10 assert that residences, schools, hospitals, and public transport should be so equipped. . . . The large majority favoring generalization of air conditioning includes even 78% of Green Party militants. . . .
Well, that’s what the people think. But how about the members of the political clique that run the place? France currently has a supposedly “center right” government, with President Emanuel Macron and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. One of the Ministers (equivalent to our cabinet secretaries) is the Minister of Ecological Transition, one Monique Barbut. 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.
Monique Barbut. Barbut is definitely not on board with letting the peasants have air conditioning. Figaro includes some extensive quotes from Barbut:
Adding Air conditioning everywhere in France to help people cope with hot summer days may not “avoid any forest fires” but not having them also won’t “avoid any forest fires” either. A/C has no effect on forest fires either positive or negative but it does have a direct affect on heat related stress and associated mortality rates.
Forest fires can only be A desired misdirection on her part.
For A/C to be used in an “emergency” it has to be installed. Correct? If it is installed, then why not use it when the owner wants to?
And here I thought a lot of Europe, including France, was in a heat stress emergency.
What are the odds that whatever buildings Barbut occupies are all air conditioned.
Its only the little people who are not entitled to any of life’s luxuries.
I once lived in one of the few residences in the US that did NOT have AC.
Working on a contract in Sunnyvale CA, I rented an apartment in February. Quite cool then. A week or two later, I realised I couldn’t find the AC controls. So I asked management “How do I turn on the AC”, only to be told, “Oh, we don’t have AC, we don’t heed it here.”
Turns out, they were right, Sunnyvale never gets quite hot enough to need AC.
On the other hand, years later, in Rome for similar reasons, I rented an apartment which of course had no AC. it was hot in July, so I bought this portable AC: DeLonghi Pinguino Compact
https://www.delonghi.com/it-it/p/condizionatori-portatili-climatizzatore-portatile-pinguino-compact-pac-es72-classic/PACES72CLASSIC.html?pid=0151453004
for less than Euro 300.
Only needed it for four to six weeks. Easy to move it between the living room and bedroom, it cooled the room down very quickly and was very quiet.
Frankly, considering how short the period in summer is when AC is useful in most of Europe, I see no point in incurring the expense of getting a fixed unit with its purchase cost plus installation costs including supports and wall penetrations, never mind the permitting restrictions recenlty reported in the UK.
You have defines parameters of a trade space.
If I had some extra spare cash, I’d buy some portable air conditioners and transport them to French with a 747 cargo plane. I’d setup a small shop in Paris. These units would sell like cold cakes.
“The Government Tries to Prevent the People From Getting Air Conditioning”
What is going on here? The previous post hd the same claim, with absolutely no evidence. There is nothing the government has done to prevent people. French, like anyone else, can just go down and buy it.
All this post offers is someone expressing distaste for AC. Odd, but whatever. There is no evidence of prevention. There seems to be a wish that the governemnt would justbuy it for everyone. Does that happen in the US?
Francis says:
A remarkable feature of governments in Europe is the extent to which they operate explicitly against the interest of their citizens and voters. … somehow the people in power are a self-perpetuating political clique that, from all evidence, seems to hold the ordinary working people and voters in complete contempt. Prime examples of operating against the interests of the people include: opening the borders to millions of impoverished migrants who hate the host countries; and imposing a fantasy “energy transition” that drives up the cost of energy and destroys industrial jobs without any measurable effect on the climate.
This is an accurate description and characterization of what has happened in the UK in recent decades. You have a nomenklatura, sometimes referred to as the ‘lanyard class’, which hates (not too strong an expression) the country, its history, its traditions and culture, most of its population, and whose agenda is totally to change it. Other elements that Francis could have mentioned include the enormous and unaffordable spend on welfare and the government employees unions, whose effect is to create a tied vote which in return for the votes funds political contributions. A defence policy which is effectively disarmament. Use of DEI to discriminate against the white working class. Gender madness – the latest manifestation of which is the NHS policy of effectively abolishing women only wards, by putting men who claim to be of the female gender in them. Despite the fact that the concept of gender as distinct from sex does not exist in UK law. He mentions immigration – an increasing source of fury. The nomeklatura is filled with compassion for the migrants, less so for the British already living here, and wants to have as many as will come. ‘Bigoted woman’, as Gordon Brown remarked, when he thought he was off camera.
I do not know about aircon policy in France. But we do know how planning permission has been used in the UK, and Francis’ characterization is spot on. Flats built either by councils or housing companies which are sealed boxes with small windows (in order to be energy efficient because climate change), and which are then unliveable in the occasional summer heat wave like the present one. We know that the London Borough of Camden has been forcing people to remove air conditioning units. In effect they are already banned in new builds. The means is planning law, but the motivation is Net Zero. In the recent heat wave there are cases of families with young kids moving into hotels, because the inside temp was higher than the very hot outside temp, and no way to cool it down.
Do the mass of the people want Net Zero? Will it do anything for the climate or weather, either British or Global? Of course not. Will banning aircon have any effect at all on either? No! Its feel goodery at huge national expense by the nomenklatura.
Of course the truly crazy thing is building housing which requires air con to be safe and liveable, then banning it, and also destroying the electricity generating capacity so there will be no power to run it, even if you change planning law.
This is indeed a sort of war of the liberal establishment on their own country and their own people. And as with the historical example of the failures of Weimar, it has the inevitable consequence of giving a license to the right. So you have the rise of Reform, which is still mainstream, neo-Thatcherism if you like, though you would think from the Guardian that Farage is well to the right of Attila the Hun. But you also have Restore, which is genuinely fringe far right. And that will not be the stopping point.
This is really dangerous. Its a country whose constitution only works because of a polite compliance with convention, and which can by a single majority vote in Parliament, move to rule by decree, abolish elections etc. As you saw with the recent moves to, and then away from, fixed term parliaments. It is not clear that an unwritten constitution can handle a split on the present scale between the governing class and the mass of the population, and it is entirely possible that this will result in a second attempt to abolish elections, this time the national ones – but it will be better prepared than the last local one, which failed. You have, Francis doesn’t comment on this. increasing attempts to censor speech, which only builds up the pressure.
It is getting to the point where people are prepared to vote for just about anyone who is not one of the three major parties, and who may make, or promises to make, real changes back to what they regard as the normal Britain of the past. We may agree or not, but this is how they feel and increasingly how they are voting.
Weimar. It doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
Again, absolutely no evidence that the Government is preventing citizens from getting aircon, either in UK or France. There are complaints about Camden council, but that is not the Government. You speak of council flats, but that is a decision of the landlord, not the Government. And again, no actual evidence, even there.
Yes, there is evidence, for the UK. Look at the planning rules for new build on heating and ventilation.
Camden council isn’t the government? Its a desperate move to claim that local government is not really government. Of course it is! In the case of Camden, its a local government run by the ruling Labour Party. Has been for ever. And council flats are commissioned by the local government. Its the council that is the landlord.
Well, believe what you want. Its thousands of miles away after all and in another country. Tell someone who was faced with removing their aircon, but managed to avoid it on appeal by referencing their solar panels and other Net Zero junk that this was nothing to do with government or Net Zero policy. Good luck explaining why not!
One thing I’ve noticed is that the so called elite are never lacking in whatever “luxury” they are busy denying others.
The proposed plan is to add AC in hospitals, nursing home and schools where needed : this should have been done since decades.
The facts :
French Govs under Hollande and Macron presidency, have systematically dismissed all modernisation investments in hospitals where AC was included. These are FACTS reported by French senators.
Furthermore, since the 2003 (the last heat wave in France), 46 billions have been collected from taxpayers with absolutely no result except for the creation of dozens of agencies, institutes, and commissions, all churning out the same climate nonsense and particularly about the dangers of air conditioning for the climate.
More over, any owner air conditioning project lowers his/her home’s energy rating DPE (which hinders renting or reselling it). The government’s intent is therefore perfectly clear and openly acknowledged.
Appointing Ms. Barbu—a mentally unstable green extremist, ex WWF—to the Ministry of Energy Transition fools no one regarding the government’s intentions.
The claim of this clown is that installing AC will not avoid wildfires … I would counter this nonsense by stating that creating a program to help children with math and physics training won’t save the whales, either : SO WHAT ? Arguing against 1 issue by putting it together with a completely independent problem is the best way to prove one’s idiocy and dishonesty.
All these media and institutional climate clowns parasites are, of course, as showed by investigators and published on X (see Frenh report), housed in heavily air-conditioned buildings.
French politicians, media and institutionals are the worst ecomarxists and energy Malthusians on the planet—even worse than US Democrats—despite the fact that France already has the lowest CO2 emitting energy supply.
These dangerous psychopaths are proponents of “degrowth” (in plain terms: we must suffer and ultimately perish in famine and poverty to save the planet).
I couldn’t have said it better myself in every respect. Thank you.
I wonder where you live.
London Borough of Camden Council has issued orders for residents with air-con to remove the installations.
Many places in Europe would require planning permission to install air-con, among other things. In the UK you need planning permission to erect a flagpole in your garden. So yes there are things the Governments have done – planning permission, without which nothing can be built, installed, used. Governments can prevent anything they want.
In “free” Europe now we all need permission to take a sh1t.
Last week volunteers in a locality in England, were stopped from clearing out rubbish from a small river because they did not have a permit under environmental regulations.
“Many places in Europe would require planning permission to install air-con, among other things.”
Really? Where? Again, no evidence about France.
Oh Nick, please.
Don’t pretend to be more stupid than you actually are – though this would be a mission impossible in your case.
All the progressive transformation shit has to start somewhere.
Be it ” anti- smoking” agenda, rainbow agenda, pronouns or whatever – and it usually starts in London, NY or California(and alternatively in the capitals of Germany,France, Italy and Swiss).
They don’t start with the sledgehammer (except for wars) but use the Fabian approach(its at first always only 2 weeks to flatten the curve,only one mandatory vaccine – 5 years and 10 booster shots later.)
By bureaucracy and overregulation they then start to tighten the noose and then the agenda starts to spread like a virus.
In this case – London again/Camden
They used Covid to push for 15 minutes cities and to slowly phase cars out centers(Barcelona Manifesto).
This in return resulted in ” crazy” far right claims that these are restrictions on travel by car – they said. Not true – its a reduction in car dependency.
Same will happen to AC’s.
Only overpriced low effective AC’s will be eventually available – the rest will be phased out alongside ICE- cars.
We all know this will happen.
“We all know this will happen.”
You imagine it will happen. None of it is evidence that the French government is preventing the populace from buying aircon.
France has banned the installation of new air conditioning that does not meet government efficiency standards. In other words, it will be limited to passive systems and less effective designs approved by the climatistas. Villification of air conditioning and other propaganda based on alarmist agendas amount to government-sponsored control, not actual freedom to decide.
“In other words”
Well, in your words. But where is the evidence that no aircon is allowed under the efficiency standards?
No, but the rules make adding any form of air conditioning to existing structures so cumbersome as to be essentially restrictive, and expensive. Such installation is subject to several levels of scrutiny certain to be unsurmuontable by design.
They are as follows:
2026 French Air Conditioning Rules — Official Text and Key PointsThe 2026 French air conditioning rules are part of broader climate and energy efficiency measures, but the exact statutory text is not publicly available in English. The regulations are codified in the Town Planning Code (Code de l’urbanisme) and the Public Health Code (Code de la santé publique), with specific provisions in Article R. 421‑17 and Article R. 1334‑31.
Core Legal Provisions1. Prior Declaration Requirement (Article R. 421‑17, Town Planning Code)
2. Noise Limits (Article R. 1334‑31, Public Health Code)
3. Planning and Appearance Rules
4. Professional Certification
5. 2026 Energy Efficiency Context
If said “efficeincy standards” are anything like those perpetrated in Great Britain or under the Biden administration, it is likewise certain that the effectiveness of such systems will be drastically reduced.
None of that amounts to a ban. There’s a rule that if it intrudes on a facade, you need planning permission. There are rules about noise and about installation safety, as you’d expect. The “efficiency ratings” affvect what can be sold, but there seem to be plenty on the market.
Red tape, cost, layers of approval, and arbitrary levels of efficiency requirements amount to a ban in practice for the majority of people. If it quacks like a duck…
“Red tape, cost, layers of approval”
Just not true. Unless you want to install it on a facade, no approval is needed. You just buy a noise etc compliant device, and get a qualified installer. Both are readily available.
I wonder how many government offices have air-conditioning ! 😉
If it is anything less than 100%, the government unions would be on strike.
In Nick’s view of the world, so long as the majic word “outlawed” hasn’t been used, nobody can claim that the government is doing anything towards making AC ownership for anyone who isn’t part of the elite, impossible.
Air-con is only for the “elite”.
AC Feudalism: Eurocrats Stay Cool While Staff Swelter In Brussels Heatwave – Climate Change Dispatch
The absurdity is that 80% of electricity generated in France comes from low-zero carbon dioxide emitting sources: nuclear 70% Hydro 10%.
‘Bureaucracy’ is derived the French bureaucratie.
Historian Robert Conquest called the new managerial class religion “bureausophy”, a high-minded justification for their existence, that they do not see their role as providing a useful service as would the old style ‘public servant’ rather they are “fulfilling a sublime mission”.
And that’s proof that it does not matter how high the low-zero carbon ratio is.
80 %, 90% or 110% .
These bastards are never ever satisfied and ask for more.
As long as we as carbon are around they’ll come up with demands.
That’s why they never try to go net- zero via nuclear energy.
Because this actually works, contrary to the green energy shit that needs to be replaced every 10- 20 years and that will only work as long as there is enough real energy to keep the green mirage going.
Doubly stupid in France, where most of their electrical power comes from nuclear….
“The European Commission’s headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave.
Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”
The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.”
Welcome to Animal Farm
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-heatwave-hq-forced-shut-down-air-conditioning-europe/
This is a wonderful site, where else could I discover details of such a degree of elitist deception by knowing the layout of a building and who works where.
I am now far less dubious about the ignorance of the EU leadership and more inclined to accept their duplicity and hypocrisy.
Are they aiming to produce a real-life Panem and introduce Hunger Games?
If the headquarters of the EU were depicted like this in a political cartoon, people would say the cartoonist had gone over the top. But, unfortunately, this is real life.
Seven floors of bureaucrats learned how important their jobs were – to the elected officials. Those bureaucrats were made crankier due to the heat and so had a motivation to turn their ire into making up even more new rules and regulations to make the peasants more miserable and less productive. Elected officials and bureaucrats alike got a win out of this.
The peasants can eat cake.
To people like the far-left Brussels bureaucrats… everyone below the top elite are just different levels of peasants
So the workers lose their AC, but management gets to keep theirs.
How convenient.
The ‘elites’ bully the working class because they can.
Europe has a 1500 year history of birthright aristocracy. The aristocratic elites had nothing but contempt for the commoners.
The modern European elite have elected themselves to that station. After all, who better to decide?
In that station, they have readily absorbed the in-built culture of disdain and dismissal of the hoi-polloi. Every execrable policy and abuse in view in Europe is explicable in that light.
Here in the U.S., the elite envy the grip of their European similogues. But American culture rejects and subverts aristocratic poseurs at every turn.
No forelock-tuggera here, except among the lower-class upper class, who desperately aspire for acceptance and to the move up.
Pardon the pedantic nit-pick, but “the hoi-polloi” is redundant. “Hoi” translates to “the”.
It’s either “the polloi” or just “hoi-polloi”.
You’re right, it’s a pedantic nit-pick. Hoi-polloi is a neologism in English, cumulated as a noun, meaning commoners. Hence, the hoi-polloi.
Too bad they don’t have a 2nd amendment.
While air conditioning makes life easier during the hottest months people have lived and survived without it. I grew up in a semi-desert area where many summer days hit 100F. I only knew one man who had air conditioning – the richest man in the town – yet I cannot remember people dying like flies from the heat. We adapted. You would try and park your car under a tree or if in the sun wind down the windows and open all doors waiting for it to drop from over 120F. At night, in mid summer, we would sit outside till well after midnight staring at the stars before going to bed. We did not need to be told to keep drinking plenty of water because we did it habitually.
That said, we have created a problem. It is not because of hot summers but the way we have built our modern houses and cities. These are a good few degrees hotter because of the UHI effect and how the houses and apartments are packed into ever smaller areas with less and less green areas. These could be 5F/3C or higher than the surrounding countryside. We would be wise to look for ways to adapt rather than the folly of thinking we can change the climate.
Humans have successfully adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.
Proof?
We are here.
“We are here.
We are here.”
The Who’s of Whoville.
The “who is” of Whoville??
One reacts to heat by slowing down and drinking more water. That cuts into productivity. That pleases politicians and the bureaucracy because it makes their useless lives seem more productive. Not as productive and certainly not as useful. But it makes them feel better.
It’s hard work doing something useful. Politicians and bureaucrats have no stomach for that.
Adapted is the wrong word. Acclimated is the word.
Adapted would be to install and use AC.
And to think, the goal of many on the left, including trolls at this site, dream of packing ever more of us into those same cities. By force if necessary.
JL Melenchon is leader of La France Insoumise, a party indistinguishable from old-fashioned communists. Its adherents happily embrace ‘Le Grand Remplacement’, the replacing of the indigenous population by immigrants from the third world, and they encourage the ‘Creolisation’, the mixing of cultures which they believe is beneficial. And they field candidates in elections which state, for example, that the Catholic White France, the France of the 1500 years since the conversion of king Clovis to Christianity, never existed.
This European hopes that Rassemblement National wipes the floor with them at the next election.
A word of caution, though: I have no sympathy whatsoever for the communists or their ideology. That said, the leader of the French Communist Party in the 1970s, Georges Marchais, argued that both legal and illegal immigration should be brought to an end because it disadvantaged both French and immigrant workers. He was right about that.
Mélenchon is an opportunist whose only real value is his own self-interest. At least the old-school communists can be credited with having genuine convictions and sticking to them, even if their blindness to the atrocities committed in the name of their ideology completely discredits them. Even so, I’ll always have more respect for an old union-organizing communist, militantly secular to the core, who sincerely believes in the coming revolution, has lived in the same public housing apartment for forty years, and has never compromised his principles, than for an opportunistic, mean-spirited electoral demagogue like Mélenchon.
The problem was that the installation of communism necessitated the commission of such atrocities.
Only rarely do communists get complete power by the ballot. The usual method is to kill enough people that the remainder vote you in, in hopes of getting peace.
The problem is that they never get peace, the violence always increases once the populace’s ability to fight back has been removed.
I’m paraphrasing the absurd remarks made by our Minister for the Environment (who, frankly, comes across more as an activist than anything else): “Air conditioning won’t solve anything. It won’t stop species from disappearing or forests from burning.”
Feel free to raise your eyebrows, my friends across the Atlantic. Or burst out laughing. Those statements are so astonishingly foolish that I’m struggling to find words strong enough to describe them. I do wonder whether her own home is air-conditioned, though. Her office almost certainly is.
As for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he has become one of the leading advocates of the country’s Islamization. He is a first-rate opportunist. Back in 2015, he was what we call a militant secularist. At the time, he believed that no religious symbols belonged in the public sphere. Since then, electoral considerations have clearly taken precedence. Unsurprisingly, he is also opposed to “intensive agriculture” and supports organic farming, even though the former feeds billions of people while the latter requires more land and more labor—and therefore more deforestation. As far as I’m concerned: long live Norman Borlaug, end of story.
We’re constantly lectured about the waste heat generated by air conditioners. Meanwhile, there are hospital rooms full of SICK people suffering in temperatures of 35°C (95°F). Naturally, we’re told this is all “the fault of industrial civilization,” and that we certainly mustn’t give in to “technological solutionism.” Give me a break. Please—just stop talking.
“Climate change” has become the perfect catch-all excuse. There’s no need to question disastrous environmental or urban planning policies because, after all, “it’s climate change’s fault.” A forest burns down? No, it’s not because it was neglected and poorly managed—it’s “climate change’s fault.” Elderly people and children faint in poorly insulated homes? No, anti-air-conditioning propaganda couldn’t possibly have anything to do with it—it’s “climate change’s fault.”
Recently, overhead railway power lines were damaged by the heat, causing a train to come to a halt in the blazing sun. No electricity meant no air conditioning in the cars. As you can imagine, the temperature inside quickly became unbearable. People packed together like sardines in a metal box under a scorching sun. Babies crying (hardly surprising—I would have cried too!), elderly passengers passing out (“Well, they destroyed the planet anyway, so they might as well die!”), and when one sensible woman stood up and forced open the doors of her railcar so people could get out and wait in the shade beside the tracks, she was fined (the fine was later canceled, but still). Why? Because “procedure” required passengers to remain inside the train, even though the interior had become as sweltering as the corrugated metal hut in The Bridge on the River Kwai.
I am absolutely furious.
P.S. I know it’s something of a tradition for people from different countries to trade good-natured jabs, but I’m getting rather tired of constantly reading that “the French know how to surrender,” but not “how to install air conditioning.” The French also knew how to endure unspeakable torture for acts of resistance. They knew how to face execution by firing squad and deportation to death camps because they stood up to an occupying force. I realize that, most of the time, these jokes about the French aren’t meant maliciously, but I still wanted to set the record straight for anyone who might need the reminder. That said, I doubt there are many people like that on WUWT, given the consistently pleasant and cordial exchanges I’ve had with all of you over the past several months.
Lafayette, we are here!
Americans needed help from the French at one time, and got it.
We should remember our history.
The French also owe a great deal to the Americans; that is obvious. No people are inherently contemptible; certain individuals and certain policies are, of course, deserving of hatred. Stupidity, malice, and contempt for others are not exclusive to any particular people, but some ideologies concentrate these traits to a remarkable degree. Environmentalism is a good example.
So is Socialism, in all its guises.
It is no coincidence that many communists have repurposed themselves as watermelon environmentalists. In Europe there is also a right-wing environmentalism, equally harmful — like all ideologies that appropriate a cause as a prism through which all their obsessions and certainties can be refracted. A telling example: the myth of climate refugees, and its instrumentalisation by both left-wing and right-wing environmentalists.
The former claim that borders must be opened to welcome climate refugees, driven from their countries by the climatic chaos caused by capitalism: this is consistent with their convictions.
The latter advocate closing borders in order to stop migratory overflow, which will only worsen because of the chaos caused by capitalism.
Left-wing environmentalists dream of a system with collectivist overtones; right-wing environmentalists fantasise about a return to the land (a rather Pétainist sensibility, in fact). Two worldviews that use the same fallacious pretexts to spread their poison.
Both currents are also fascinated by collapse narratives and Malthusian thinking.
They are ideologically opposed, certainly, but they share their aversion to capitalism and industrial society. They are not face to face, but back to back. Two opposite colours, if you will, but whose extremes meet, like a colour spectrum curled back on itself.
There are some fine dramas ahead if these people come to power.
“like all ideologies that appropriate a cause as a prism through which all their obsessions and certainties can be refracted.”
A very nice and descriptive turn of phrase. 🙂 And very accurate.
Your analysis of the two groups is very compelling. I’d not thought much about conservative Malthusians, as the socialist variety are so in evidence these days.
I see the two groups as the same sort of human – innately collectivists but, as you say, with alternative and conflicting ideologies through which “their obsessions and certainties can be refracted.”
I do beleive, also, that innately collectivist humans are a H.s. sub-species in the true sense of Evolutionary Biology.
Thanks for your compliments!
It is true that the far left attracts much more attention, largely because opinions considered “too far right” are demonized (at least in Western Europe).
The political instrumentalization of a concept as all-encompassing as ecology is extremely dangerous, precisely because it encompasses everything that makes up human life, from beginning to end: food, housing, transportation, family, and so on. Environmental policy should remain pragmatic. And the statistics clearly show that only societies that become wealthier can afford the luxury of caring about the environment.
We, “the Deplorables…”
The ruling elite are all for heating with heat pumps because heat pumps are very energy efficient and will save the planet.
The ruling elite are totally against cooling with heat pumps because heat pumps are not energy efficient and will destroy the planet.
Do they actually know what heat pumps are? Do they know air-cons are heat pumps?
Are fridges good or bad heat pumps?
Had they any wit they would promote heat pumps as climatisation – can cool your home in Summer, heat it in Winter – since heat pumps can be bi-directional. This would be a good selling point.
In the UK traditional tumble dryers are to be banned to be replaced with ones using…. heat pumps.
In countries with leftist governments, the populace should not be allowed to be too comfortable or to enjoy themselves too much. Instead all these privileges should be equally distributed among the less fortunate.
What actually happens, is that all these privileges are equally distributed amongst the elite who run the country.
If hoi polloi were allowed to have air conditioners, then there would be less for the elite.
Crappy government on steroids. Let’s try a market solution put no restrictions on personal air conditioners, they should be available at all markets for a reasonable price. Let the consumers decide whether air conditioning is desirable or not. I have a window air conditioner but it is stored in the shed, I open the windows at night and put a box fan in the window to blow the hot air out and suck the cool night air in the other open windows.