Air conditioning creates political divide as France records hottest day

Air conditioning creates political divide as France records hottest dayImage source, AFP via Getty ImagesImage caption, Only about 25% of homes in France have an air-con unitByHugh SchofieldParis correspondentPublished5 minutes agoWith temperatures soaring, France is being forced to re-think its longstanding reservations about one possible answer to climate change: air-con.This week debate about la clim' (climatisation) has once again burst out, with Marine Le Pen on the populist right urging a mass subsidised roll-out and traditionally hostile Greens conceding that some air-conditioning may now be inevitable.Currently the country has a low take-up, with only 25% of households equipped with an air-con unit. In Spain and Italy the figure is 50%, and in the US and Japan 90%.French hospitals and schools are also only rarely equipped. Thousands of schools have had to shut this week, and medical and nursing staff complain of conditions fast becoming intolerable.But with temperatures nudging 40C - Tuesday was France's hottest day on record - there has been a rush to buy portable air-conditioning appliances, just to let children enjoy a few hours in class, or for suffocating apartment-dwellers to make it through the night.And more and more, it seems, long-standing opponents of air-conditioning - mainly on the environmentalist left - recognise that it is bound to be part of the country's response to global warming.This week the head of the Ecologists party Marie Tondelier broke something of a taboo when she said that air-conditioning would be needed in schools and hospitals. "There are places where we just can't do without it now," she said.Her break with what she called "anti-clim' dogma" is significant because until now the Green movement in France has regarded air-conditioning as the worst of solutions to climate change.Far from attacking the root causes of global-warming, activists said, recourse to la clim' was merely a...