Air conditioning creates political divide after France records hottest day
bbc.com
bbc.com
No, I buy the ice at the grocery store. To make the ice I used required someone to spend a few cents of electricity. It is still significantly less expensive to use an evaporative cooler than HVAC even factoring in ice and the cost of delivering said ice to the grocery store. I could reduce the cost even more by getting my own ice maker, especially if I could find one of the ammonia driven devices from the early 20'th century. Society has stepped backwards in technology in this area. [1]
I should add that ice is optional. It just lowers the temperature of the are a tiny bit. For many people water will be sufficient.
To make the point further, the article states France’s right wing party advocated for installing air conditioning in schools and hospitals. Again, if a US politician did such a thing, they would be considered a Stalinist communist.
The article shows how US’s Overton window is completely disjoint from France’s. I don’t want to make a false equivalence between these two countries as I think France’s two extremes in this article both seem reasonable and the US’s right wing extreme of “we are going to cancel wind mill construction because they’re ugly” is not.