{"id":723426,"date":"2026-06-24T15:59:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T15:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/723426\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T15:59:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T15:59:09","slug":"europe-heatwave-air-conditioning-creates-political-divide-as-france-records-hottest-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/723426\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe heatwave: Air conditioning creates political divide as France records hottest day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">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. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;In the environmental context, we should have la clim everywhere,&#8221; said Olivier Terrien of the CGT union.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">According to Valerie P\u00e9cresse, the conservative president of the Paris regional council, &#8220;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.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">P\u00e9cresse, 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The political right has always been more pro-clim than the left &#8211; and none more so than the National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">This week she has been calling for a nationwide &#8220;plan clim&#8221; to equip all schools and hospitals with air-conditioning.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">According to RN spokesman Jean-Philippe Tanguy, the plan would also include government-backed interest-free loans worth \u20ac20bn ($22.7bn; \u00a317.2bn) to allow 30 to 40 million householders to install cooling units.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">But the truth is that with temperatures approaching danger levels in France, with lives at stake and schools and hospitals at risk of breakdown &#8211; everyone is coming to the same conclusion: that more clim is inevitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A giant new hospital being built in the Brittany city of Nantes for example will have air-conditioning in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723427,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":["post-723426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}