PARIS — Air conditioning isn’t the key to address ever more intense heat waves, France’s minister for ecological transition said Tuesday in response to the far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen’s proposal for a “major air conditioning equipment plan.”
“Our issue with air conditioning concerns heating,” Agnès Pannier-Runacher explained, calling air conditioning an “inadequate adaptation” to rising temperatures.
“When you cool a room, you need heat to obtain the cold — which means you’re necessarily heating another area,” the French official told reporters. “You’re heating up the streets, which increases hot spots.”
A 2020 study on air conditioning use in Paris underlined that “if AC systems release heat into the street, as is most often the case, the outside air is warmed and the heat wave worsens,” with an impact of several degrees Celsius depending on how widespread the use is.
