My American mind cannot comprehend being told I cannot have AC.

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Barely 7% of school building surfaces are currently cooled, and less than 10% of rooms in facilities housing elderly people – a figure that has remained virtually unchanged since 2020. “ We support air conditioning wherever it is necessary ,” reiterated Maud Bregeon, specifying that schools should be supported when the need is clearly demonstrated.

A turning point? Not at all. Two days later, the Minister for Ecological Transition, Monique Barbut, confirmed the government's true stance : no national equipment plan, no mandates, no earmarked funds – at most, support on a case-by-case basis, if the buildings are suitable and if other solutions prove insufficient. In short: there's no question of reforming the standards that, for years, have made installing efficient cooling not only expensive but incredibly complex. While the government's rhetoric has clearly shifted in recent days, air conditioning remains carefully kept out of the public policy discussion.

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The mechanism is complex, but it deserves to be detailed in order to understand the heart of the impasse.

The system relies on a central indicator, the Bbio (for bioclimatic needs), a theoretical construct measuring a building's "gross" energy requirements for heating, cooling, and lighting, independent of the technical equipment that will be installed. It's an assessment of the building's passive performance—its insulation, orientation, solar shading, etc. At this stage, energy production or distribution systems are not taken into account. The calculation simulates, hour by hour, a reference climatic year. But it contains a pitfall: the technicians who drafted the decree decided that as soon as a cooling system is declared, the windows must be considered to remain closed at night (as if it were obvious that in an air-conditioned dwelling, residents never open their windows).

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I guess my American mind is too simple to understand how a country that once beheaded a queen for telling them to eat cake will stand for a government bureaucrat telling them they have to meet the treshold for having AC. It is air conditioning in a country that gets most of its electricity from nuclear energy. Even if you believe in the climate change fear mongering doomsday predictions using AC in France is not going to increase carbon emissions because nuclear is carbon free. The only damn central indicator that someone should need to install AC is a thermometer.