No A/C, No Problem. France Shrugs At Thousands Dead For ‘Climate Change.’

As World Cup travelers experience the modern marvels of everyday life in the United States, the headlines are replete with appreciation for Buc-ee’s, Bass Pro Shops, and bottomless chips and salsa. With summer’s arrival, here’s another one for that list not getting attention but should: air conditioning.

Roughly 1 in 5 homes in Europe have air conditioning, compared to an estimated 90% in the United States. While we may take it for granted, the implications mean more than tossing and turning during sleepless nights: it’s a matter of life and death, literally.

A comparison of heatwave-related deaths between the United States and Europe from 2020 to 2025 is alarming. In our country, 9,436 people died. In Europe, 248,875 died, an increase of more than 2,500%.

In any other circumstance, the preventable deaths of a quarter of a million people would demand a United Nations condemnation. Heat takes the lives of the vulnerable: the sick and the elderly, those trapped in higher floors in government housing, those convalescing in windowless hospital beds or nursing homes.

So why the relative silence from the French, still a first-world destination despite their economic stagnation? Because in their country, air conditioning is not a convenience or even a necessity — it’s a controversy. Sacrifice your citizens in the name of battling climate change, and those deaths are an acceptable casualty for the green cause.

During a brutal stretch of heat last summer, one left-leaning French newspaper described air conditioning as “an environmental aberration that must be overcome.” Since 2007, the government has mandated that air conditioning be set at no lower than 79°F in public spaces.

And France accepts it. The great American economist Thomas Sowell made famous a profoundly complex, yet common-sense, quote: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

The lack of air conditioning in France is not a solution, but a trade-off. The most extreme of the tradeoffs is death.

The cold is even more deadly. Annually, nine times as many people die from the cold as from the heat, though it gets much less attention. This past winter, the East Coast endured brutal conditions. The climate protesters were nowhere to be found when large swaths of the country were buried under 18 inches of ice and snow for weeks. No one was glued to the George Washington Parkway, headed to Reagan Airport at -15. The heat makes us ornery and angry, explaining the undercurrent of every Tennessee Williams play.   

Just like the heat, death by cold is a trade-off. If you think this is just a French or blue state problem, think again.

Texas, the oil capital of the world, has an enormously powerful green lobby that has pushed for state-subsidized, unreliable, expensive wind power. When a 2021 ice and snowstorm crippled the entire industry, plunging several million people into weeks without power, more than 700 people froze to death. No one rioted or looted. No one built them a statue. Just as in France, they are an acceptable casualty for the green cause.

Even red Texas can be as blind as France when it comes to going green.

There are very few solutions; there are only trade-offs, and the more one digs into opportunity costs, feasibility, and scalability of energy, the more Sowell’s genius quote dissects the conundrum.

To be sure, fossil fuels are not perfect, but neither is the world. Yet the benefits of fossil fuels are documented and real. As U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright put it, they have contributed to “doubling human life expectancy, lifting almost all of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine, telecommunications, planes, trains, and automobiles too.”

The trade-off is “going green,” and when placed side-by-side in comparison, very few are willing to take the trade-off. Ask any climate-change-concerned parent about “going green” with cloth diapers, beating them clean against a rock in the river, and using that same water source to bathe and make soup. Without fossil fuels, there are no disposable diapers, washing machines, or laundry detergents. Our American quality of life is the trade-off we never eschew.

Even if we pretend we can power our current lifestyle with solar or wind, the fact is, we are still using fossil fuels, just differently. There is more oil, gas, and coal in the sourcing, manufacturing, transportation, installation, and maintenance of wind and solar than wind and solar will ever offset in their lifespans.

Going green is no solution to our climate “problem.” It is a trade-off, and a losing one.

It is tragic to see France accept death as a trade-off for a faux crisis. Our country should not follow their lead, or Texas’ terrible lead, to go green and live miserable, unhygienic, unhealthy, and uncomfortable existences. If we do, the next time our country hosts a World Cup, all those foreign travelers experiencing the amazement of everyday life in the United States today may as well stay home.

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Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs. He also runs a sheep and cattle farm in rural Virginia. Contact him at [email protected] and follow him on X @DanielTurnerPTF