No AC for You: Paris Burns While Officials Stay Cool

Paris's mercury shot up like a rocket with no brakes in June, blowing past 44°C. The Louvre cut its opening hours and the Eiffel Tower baked in the heat. More than 3,000 primary and secondary schools were forced to close.

Meanwhile, at Paris's funeral homes, phones rang every few minutes, with each caller asking the same question: "Is there any space left for another body?"

Funeral home director Zouhaeir Hertelli's phone would not stop ringing. "We have no solution to offer them," he said, "We're completely full." To free up space, he had to transport some bodies to Chartres, 80 kilometers away. He even applied to the government for permission to place temporary refrigerated containers outside the funeral home. That application is still under review.

The numbers from France's public health agency are even more disheartening. In just three days, from June 23 to 25, excess deaths nationwide totaled around 1,000. June 23 set a new record for the highest temperature since France began keeping weather records, surpassing even the 2003 heatwave of the century that killed 15,000 people.

It was at this exact moment that France's Minister for Ecological Transition, Monique Barbut, stepped forward.

Barbut spoke publicly at the Paris Air Quality Monitoring Center on June 26. She said she was "horrified" to hear public calls for widespread air conditioning. Air conditioning, she argued, was never a fundamental solution to the climate crisis. Mass installation of AC units could neither curb forest fires nor save wildlife populations. "This is not adaption to global warming," she said, "this is an emergency measure."

Her words landed on the French public like a bucket of cold water poured over their heads in 40-degree heat. Well, except the water was scalding hot.

Public fury ignited instantly. Fewer than 25% of French households have air conditioning. Public schools have AC coverage below 7%, and countless nursing homes and community clinics still lack even basic cooling equipment. Emergency room temperatures have long hovered near 40°C, leaving critically ill patients with no way to recover safely. For elderly people living alone, low-income families, and tenants crammed into old Haussmann-era buildings, air conditioning isn't a luxury. It's the last line of defense keeping them alive.

But the real spectacle was yet to come.

Members of the public went digging and found that the government office buildings housing Minister Barbut's office, the Séquoia Tower and La Défense's Grande Arche, were already fully equipped with central air conditioning. She lectured at climate summits about carbon-neutral emissions targets from a cooled office. At the same time, she called ordinary citizens' desire for air conditioning "horrifying". She claimed AC was merely an "emergency measure" rather than a long-term adaptation strategy, yet let her own cool breeze become an everyday fixture.

A textbook definition of a "double standard." Long-term ecological goals are meant to constrain ordinary people, while immediate comfort is reserved for oneself.

The public backlash came fast and hard. Within just two days, France's health authorities scrambled to finalize a procurement plan, allocating 30,000 air conditioning units on a priority basis to public hospitals, nursing homes, and schools. Paris's city government simultaneously procured over a thousand cooling units. This policy U-turn resembled an actor caught off guard, frantically fixing their makeup after being slapped on stage. Except the price of this particular performance was over a thousand lives already lost.

The absurdity of this whole episode isn't that environmental ideals are inherently wrong. The arguments from France's Green Party and left-wing camp aren't entirely without merit. Old buildings have poor insulation, AC condenser units worsen the urban heat island effect, and cooling cities requires ecological solutions rather than simply relying on electric cooling. These are all genuine technical challenges.

The problem arises when "long-term planning" is invoked to dismiss the most urgent needs of ordinary people right now. That's when environmentalism stops being public policy and becomes class rhetoric instead.

The long-standing "consensus" in French society, that urban cooling should rely on ecological retrofitting rather than air conditioning, is at its core a consensus of the propertied class. Homeowners who can afford exterior wall insulation upgrades, families with the resources to escape to summer retreats, and officials with the power to enjoy central air conditioning in their offices can of course afford to speak elegantly about "ecological adaptation."

But for tenants crammed into uninsulated old stone buildings, elderly people living alone in retirement, or medical staff toughing it out in emergency rooms with nothing but reflective sun shields and aging fans, the phrase "long-term planning" is just another way of saying, "you'll just have to keep enduring it."

This is the truth behind the "cooling class." Cool air has a class hierarchy, and so does environmentalism.

Nearly 15,000 people in France died from heat-related causes in the 2003 heatwave, most of them elderly people living alone. The government at the time was criticized for its sluggish response and disregard for the vulnerable. Twenty-three years later, history has repeated itself almost exactly. The only difference is that the government's excuse has been upgraded from "negligence" to "environmentalism." From funeral homes overflowing to a minister's air-conditioned office, from 1,000 excess deaths to air conditioning being called "shocking," the distance between these two realities is merely a few floors' worth of height. Yet it separates two entirely different Frances.

The cool breeze still flows through Minister Barbut's office. Meanwhile, at the Paris funeral home, Hertelli is still waiting for approval on that refrigerated container. "Imagine your father's or mother's body has begun to decompose," he said, "and we're unable to take care of it, and we have no solution to offer them."

Perhaps that sentence is the most honest confession to emerge from this entire heatwave. When environmental slogans are used to mask governance failures, and when long-term planning is used to dodge questions of life and death happening right now, so-called "climate adaptation" becomes just another sophisticated way of shirking responsibility.

The real double standard was never as simple as "saying one thing and doing another." It's a system that grants some people the permanent right to talk about "the future," while ensuring others never get to see "the present."

Paris's summer still has a long way to go. But for some, there won't be a next summer.

Beacon Institute

** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **

In a recent interview, Donald Trump put Taiwan back on his "business reckoning" table. Speaking to Fortune magazine, the self-proclaimed dealmaker boasted about engineering the US government's equity stake in Intel — and the windfall that followed. He made no attempt to hide his view that Taiwan's rise in semiconductors amounted to nothing less than stealing America's business.

Trump's blunt rhetoric and naked hegemonic logic offer a masterclass in "America First" thinking. They also reveal, with brutal clarity, just how little a so-called ally is worth on a businessman-president's ledger.

Trump's crowning achievement, as he tells it, was a deal he described last August as a stroke of genius. The US government converted a portion of the CHIPS and Science Act subsidies into roughly US$8.9 billion worth of equity, acquiring approximately 9.9% of Intel's shares and instantly becoming one of its largest shareholders.

Recounting the deal, Trump was every bit the merchant. He recalled telling Intel's CEO to "I said, ‘Give the country 10% ownership for free in Intel,’" — and when the CEO readily agreed, Trump's only regret was that he “should have asked for more”. What made him especially self-satisfied was that within just eight months, the investment's paper value had soared to over US$50 billion. He could barely hold back: "Did I get any credit for this? Does anyone even know I did this?" In his mind, national strategy and a successful equity investment are one and the same — the only metric that matters is profit and loss.

The backdrop to this "successful investment," however, is Intel's ongoing struggles amid fierce market competition. For Trump, America's relative decline in global chip market share has one explanation — simple and brutal. This is not the result of market forces or industrial evolution. It is a theft. And the thief is Taiwan.

Trump has complained on multiple occasions that "Taiwan stole our chip business." He has claimed that had he become president sooner, he would have slapped 100% or even 200% tariffs on imported chips, ensuring the industry never left American shores. "Intel would have all that business now," he said. "And there would be no Taiwan."

The sophistication of this narrative lies in what it erases. Decades of complex industrial development — shaped by global comparative advantage, accumulated expertise, and market forces — are reduced entirely to a story of American leaders being "stupid" and foreigners doing the "stealing."

The central irony of this performance lies exactly here. When Taiwan is needed as a critical node in the advanced technology supply chain — or as a geopolitical counterweight to Beijing — it is a "vital democratic partner." The moment American domestic firms feel competitive pressure, or a politician needs an external scapegoat for homegrown industrial problems, Taiwan transforms overnight from "partner" into "thief."

Trump's remarks ruthlessly expose the double standards of Western politicians. In his purely transactional worldview, Taiwan's value is entirely instrumental. "Support" carries an unspoken condition: your production capacity must serve my strategic interests, and ideally find its way back to my companies. "Protection" comes with a prerequisite: your existence must not cut into my bottom line. Trump pines for an era when "Intel has all that business". The core of his policy vision is nothing more than using tariffs and subsidies as chains to drag global supply chains back to American soil.

Trump's latest performance is a jarring wake-up call for anyone who has staked their future on an individual American "security commitment." His "chip regrets" make it abundantly clear: in his calculus, Taiwan's prosperity and development are only legitimate insofar as they align with American — and specifically certain American corporations' — commercial interests. Today you are condemned for "stealing business." Tomorrow, if cutting you out entirely seems more profitable, you will be discarded without a second thought.

The most tragic fate of a pawn is not simply being sacrificed. It is that in the eyes of the player, it never had independent value to begin with. It is merely a cost — one to be reassessed, or erased, at any moment.

When an American president can so casually dismiss an entire region's economic achievements as his country's "loss," any talk of "ironclad" commitments sounds hollow — and deeply ironic.

Perhaps this is the price one must foresee for willingly becoming a pawn. Your story, your livelihood, and even your security — in someone else's narrative — will always be nothing more than a deal waiting for the right price.