The Patriot Post® · The AC War Heats Up

When the boss put me on the French air conditioning kerfuffle this morning, I had my doubts. I mean, how could I possibly fart in France’s general direction in a way that hadn’t already been done countless times before? What possible new derogatoriness could I heap upon those sneering, sniveling, cheese-eating surrender monkeys?

And then it hit me: What better time to fête our nation’s oldest frenemy than during our 250th birthday celebration?

Frenemy, though, doesn’t do justice to our relationship with France. After all, it suggests a simmering friendship. Instead, as authors John J. Miller and Mark Molesky remind us in their magnificent book Our Oldest Enemy, French hostility toward the United States dates back to at least 1704, when the French and their Indian fellow savages massacred American settlers in Deerfield, Massachusetts. What’s more, Miller and Molesky debunk the commonly held belief that, Lafayette’s individual heroism notwithstanding, France’s allyship during the Revolutionary War was somehow désintéressé. As Miller and Molesky write:

Contrary to popular notions, the French entered the war reluctantly and were mainly interested in hurting their rivals, the British. After the war, the French … shaped their policies to limit the growth and power of the new nation. The notorious XYZ Affair, involving French efforts to undermine the government of George Washington, led to an undeclared naval war with France in 1798. During the Civil War, the French supported the Confederacy and installed a puppet emperor in Mexico.

And I haven’t even touched upon the 20th century, during which France kept sticking it to us, from that disastrously punitive World War I settlement at Versailles, to those rotten Vichy troops killing hundreds of our men in North Africa, to De Gaulle’s backstabbery during the Cold War. (Incidentally, De Gaulle’s kepi hat has always struck me as stupid-looking, just like it looked stupid on Pops Stargell and the Pirates back in 1976. But I digress.)

On top of all this, France’s imperialism and its military incompetence at Dien Bien Phu sucked us into Vietnam, and they’d just as soon forget that the genocidal Cambodian maniac Pol Pot was radicalized in Paris during his salad days with the French Communist Party.

So France’s historical treachery isn’t something to be laughed off. On the contrary, it’s been deeply and deadly serious.

Which brings me to today’s Air Conditioning War. Here, it’s no surprise that as our nation basks in the World Cup love being heaped upon it by all the nations of the world, it just had to be France to piss in the punchbowl.

“Dear American journalists and social media ‘influencers,’” began Paris Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar in an Instagram post on Friday, “for days, some of you have been criticizing and making fun of Paris because the city does not have A/C in every room. OMG, this is so rich!”

Pulvar’s Angela Davis-style afro tells us all we need to know about her politics, but still. She then went on to blame the United States for Europe’s deadly heat wave: “As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, you bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing. Your cities ‘90% air-conditioned’ are not unrelated to this. In Paris, we take responsibility.”

Sacré Blechhh!

As skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg noted on Fox News, “We’ve had this technology for more than a century, and Europe doesn’t want to use it, mostly because they want to feel virtuous. But the virtue has real costs.”

Never mind that, as economist Stephen Moore recently pointed out, the decades-long $16 trillion global “climate change” campaign might’ve been the greatest financial scandal in the history of the world. Even the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has “quietly adjusted its modeling framework of a 4–5°C warming by 2100 last month,” thereby walking back its doomsday predictions due to greenhouse gas emissions. Nothingtoseeheremovealongplease.

But notice how Pulvar doesn’t even mention the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions: China. She’s not exactly a profile in courage. She’s probably still sore because Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Scam during his first term.

As PJ Media’s Catherine Salgado points out, “Since there is in fact no man-made, world-ending climate crisis, and since Communist China continues to make all the sacrifices of Western countries meaningless as they spew ever more pollution, condemning AC is incredibly dumb.”

You’re telling me it’s dumb. In fairness, though, it’s not just the Froggy French. Heaven help you if you dare try to install an air conditioner in Londonistan.

As Alexander Kustov notes in a Wall Street Journal piece, “Opposition to cooling is written into law in Europe.” Sheer insanity. He adds: “Summer heat is dangerous. In France, a single heat wave killed nearly 15,000 people in 2003. Across Europe, more than 61,000 people died in record heat in 2022. Air conditioning is the cure. The economist Alan Barreca and his colleagues found that the spread of home cooling explains most of the decline in ‘hot-day-related fatalities’ in the U.S. since 1960.”

At the end of the day, air conditioning is a human marvel, a human innovative achievement meant to make our lives better amid an occasionally hostile environment. The world is largely grateful for it, but those French, and their fellow Europeans, well, they can keep on cooking if they so choose.