Mocking France Makes America Cooler

There were more than 1,200 deaths in France last Wednesday. 1,400 more on Thursday. Another 1,400 on Friday. For context, the country’s normal daily death toll runs around 900. The body count is climbing so fast that Paris’s mortuaries are turning away the dead because they’re full.

And what’s to blame for this sudden mort spike? A lack of air conditioning. Because, apparently, keeping your home below 90 degrees is a vice.

While acknowledging that this is a horrible situation — elderly French citizens kicking the bucket too soon because their government seemingly cares more about virtue-signaling on climate than keeping them alive — Americans can still make light of it all. It’s what we do.

Thousands of journalists, influencers, and hysterical posters have taken to social media to mock European governments for their abysmal handling of la canicule plaguing the land across the pond.

Americans have every right to do this because those deaths were entirely preventable. It just so happens that in the 20th century, some of the brightest human minds discovered a way to not die from heat. Europe is still, inexplicably, opting out.

In France, only one in four homes has air conditioning, and that’s been true through a parade of “once in a generation” heat waves: 2025, 2003, 1993, 1911, 1865, and onward. In the old days, presumably, they just blamed Mother Nature for going through menopause.

Today, however, Parisians are blaming, wait for it, America.

Paris’s Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar took to Instagram this week to angrily declare that the U.S. bears a “significant amount of responsibility” for grandmère dying of a heat-induced stroke.

She says it’s just “rich” that we would dare mock the French, because it’s America’s use of air conditioning that contributed to their summer oven.

Well, chérie, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there is this country called China… and even if the United States zeroed out its entire 11-ish percent share of global emissions tomorrow, shuttered every factory, blacked out every city, it would do roughly nothing to the planet’s thermostat. It would, however, gut American manufacturing, torch the energy sector, and raise the cost of literally everything for actual American families. Meanwhile, the CCP, which accounts for north of 30 percent of global CO2 emissions on its own, would keep chugging along, industrializing, polluting, and burning coal like there’s no tomorrow.

If every American simply flipped off their AC tomorrow in penance, thousands more of us would die of heat every year, our summers would get considerably more pungent, and the planet would not notice. Residential cooling is something like 3% of total U.S. emissions. China alone outpaces our entire economy’s output by more than double. So if you’re looking for the country actually moving the needle on global temperature, Madame Pulvar, you’re pointing your finger at the wrong continent.

Meanwhile, back home, France isn’t just under-equipped for the heat — it’s actively legislated against fixing it. Because of strict rules on exterior units, historic-preservation restrictions in cities like Paris that make installing AC a bureaucratic nightmare, and a cultural campaign treating air conditioning as an indulgence have left people with one real option: public fountains. Videos of Parisians wading into them fully clothed have been circulating all week, which is delightful content and a genuinely bleak admission that “go stand in the Trocadéro” is the national heat plan.

So no, Madame Pulvar, we will not be powering down. We’ll keep feeling that glorious blast of cold air on a 100-degree day, and we’ll keep mocking a government that would rather let its elderly undergo a sweatocide than admit a window unit might have saved them.

Of course, Paris could fix this tomorrow. Outfitting every household in France with a basic in-window AC unit would cost an estimated 4 billion dollars, which is nothing compared to the 41 billion euros France has earmarked for “green” spending in 2026 alone, or against the country’s actual climate adaptation fund, the one built specifically to help France survive disasters like this exact heat wave, which just got slashed from 1.5 billion euros to 837 million in this year’s budget.

They have the money. They are just choosing not to spend it on the living.

It’s hard not to suspect the French government doesn’t actually want this problem solved. Dead pensioners stop drawing on the state’s beloved socialized medicine, and a rising body count is a far more useful prop for “global warming is happening” than a budget line about window units would ever be. Mais peut-être que je me trompe.

I love you, Paris. I really do. But you are making yourself very hard to defend lately. Strip away the gorgeous men, the breathtaking architecture, and sassy disdain for tourists, and what’s left is a government that would rather let its people cook than turn on the AC.

Maybe try the window unit. Until then, the mocking continues.