Temperatures in Paris cracked 104 degrees last week. The Eiffel Tower cut its hours. The Louvre did the same. Authorities banned alcohol in public spaces and restricted large gatherings. At least 48 people drowned across France seeking relief in rivers and lakes they had no business swimming in.
And somehow, this is America's fault.
Paris Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar — elected just this past March — took to Instagram on Friday to deliver a scolding that would make a Sorbonne professor blush. Her target: American journalists and social media users who had the audacity to point out that Paris doesn't have air conditioning.
"Dear American journalists and social media 'influencers': 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 wrote, deploying scare quotes around "influencers" like a woman who just discovered the internet exists.
But she wasn't done. Not even close.
Pulvar then pivoted to the real villain in a story about French people dying in French heat in French cities with no French air conditioning: you. The American taxpayer, sitting comfortably in your climate-controlled living room, watching your climate-controlled television.
"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," she declared. "Your cities '90% air-conditioned' are not unrelated to this. In Paris, we take responsibility."
Taking responsibility, apparently, means refusing to install the technology that keeps people alive during extreme heat and then blaming the country that did install it. As reported by LifeZette, Pulvar's Instagram lecture came while thousands of emergency workers were being deployed across France to handle the crisis — a crisis made worse by the deliberate absence of cooling infrastructure in homes and public buildings.
The logic, if we're being generous enough to call it that, works like this: Americans use air conditioning. Air conditioning uses energy. Energy causes emissions. Emissions cause warming. Warming causes heat waves. Heat waves kill French people. Therefore, American air conditioning killed French people.
By that math, the Wright Brothers are personally responsible for every delayed flight at Charles de Gaulle.
Pulvar closed her sermon with a flourish: "If every American city made the same ecological transition efforts as Paris and many European cities, believe me, the whole world would be better off. So please, enough with the lecture. Just start doing your part."
The "ecological transition efforts" she's referring to include, most notably, not air-conditioning buildings during a heat wave that has killed dozens of people. Paris has spent years positioning itself as a leader in green urban policy — fewer cars, more bike lanes, ambitious carbon targets. All very admirable on a PowerPoint slide. Less admirable when your citizens are drowning in rivers because their apartments are uninhabitable.
There's a version of this conversation that's worth having. Energy consumption, urban heat islands, sustainable cooling — these are real engineering problems with real tradeoffs. But that conversation requires honesty about what those tradeoffs actually cost. And right now, in France, the cost is measured in body bags.
Pulvar was elected three months ago. Her city is in the middle of a heat emergency. Forty-eight people are dead. And her first instinct was to open Instagram and yell at Americans for being comfortable.
When your ideology tells you that the people who survived are the problem and the policy that killed people is the solution, the ideology isn't saving the planet. It's just letting people die with a clear conscience.
