Libs’ Air-conditioning Hypocrisy: Cool Living for Me, Sweating for Thee
“All animals are equally cool,” famously wrote George Orwell, “but some animals are more equally cool than others.” OK, he didn’t quite say that. But updating his line for the 2020s may be appropriate given the newly heating up air-conditioning wars.
That is, first we had a French leader blaming American AC use for “global warming.” Now we have this Sunday headline:
Dem equality: After telling New Yorkers to keep temps at 78, Mamdani’s City Hall enjoys 54 degrees in places.
As the source, the Washington Examiner, implies, this gives new meaning to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “warmth of collectivism.”
Yet this is small potatoes — or maybe hot potatoes — compared to European leftists’ behavior during the recent hot spell. Just consider the following, courtesy of Politico:
The European Commission’s headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave.
Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”
“So that’s at least equitable,” you say? “The European bigwigs are sharing the sacrifice.” Not so fast. Read Politico’s next paragraph, bearing in mind that denied AC were only floors “1 to 7”:
The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.
Wow — just wow. Talk about leaning into your hypocrisy. As commentator Clarice Feldman wrote of the above June 28:
It reminds me of the many laws in feudal Europe that limited the peasants to poor housing, harsh labor, inadequate low-protein nutrition, ragged clothing, and made it illegal for them to escape.
Where the analogy fails is that feudal aristocracy didn’t make any pretense at believing in “equality.” They could enjoy the finer things because they were simply better than the great unwashed. Of course, many would say our leftists are equally supercilious. They just need to justify their self-exaltation and -indulgence a bit more.
Around Europe in 80(plus) Degrees
The above cases aren’t outliers, either. Consider France. As Feldman also writes:
Monique Barbut, Minister for Ecological Transition (yes, there is such a thing there), works in an air-conditioned office. She holds stock in a number of large energy-consuming companies like Airbus. She swatted away questions relating to her failure to ensure air conditioning where it’s most needed with this non-sequitur deflection:
I’m horrified by the people who tell me that all we need to do is put air conditioning everywhere (…) Do you think that’s going to prevent forest fires, the death of animals? That’s not adaptation, it’s an emergency measure.
Well, it is easy being idealistic when you don’t have to live with your ideals.
And realize here that, yearly, more people die from heat-related causes in Europe than from gunshots in the U.S. (The firearms data include suicides, too.) In fact, France’s AC aversion contributed to approximately 2,025 excess deaths during the June heatwave alone. Moreover, when a Paris to Nice train broke down in a tunnel June 26, babies fainted in the 122-degree temperatures.
It gets more preposterous, too. Because kids are also passing out in schools, Feldman further states, in
one city in southern France, parents got together to pay for some air conditioners. The communist mayor ordered them ripped out because not every school in the city had them. Égalité!
(By the way, there’s an irony to France’s AC-phobia. That is, the country derives 67 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy. In other words, its power generation doesn’t create much CO2, relatively speaking.)
Moving on, note here that France and Britain have historically been rivals. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the latter doesn’t want to be outdone in the AC wars. As The Telegraph reported June 24 on the U.K.:
Council planning officers ordered residents to remove air-con units over fears they produce too much carbon dioxide, stating they should only be used as a “last resort”.
… Air-con engineers told The Telegraph that they had been called out to remove perfectly operational units worth thousands of pounds across London.
The Brit pseudo-elites, you see, are requiring the peasants to “justify” their need for “active cooling.”
Feldman provides some perspective on this, too:
Now, what makes all this even crazier is that all new housing in the UK is required to have heat pumps. As far as I can tell, heat pumps and air conditioners are technically the same — they use the same compression cycle — the heat pump extracts heat from outside and brings it inside, while the air conditioner brings the heat from inside to the outside.
Speaking of crazier brings us to Germany. Feldman again:
Even facilities where common sense demands air conditioning — like hospitals — are deprived of [air conditioners] because placing them in new buildings would create envy in owners of older buildings where there are none.
This includes a new hospital in Düsseldorf that provides care to highly vulnerable heart attack victims. So while recovering from your coronary, you can have a heat stroke.
Yet there’s still more, as Germany is channeling infamous propagandist Josef Goebbels and flat-out lying to its citizens subjects. As author Maarten Boudry tells us, the German government claims that
portable A/C is “not effective” because the pressure drop sucks hot air into the room, “which heats the room even more”.
For the record, I’ve been using portable AC (window units), and nothing else, almost my entire life. Fact: They work. Why, my parents had one that would convert a room from tropical to arctic in 30 minutes.
Always Dumb but Never in Doubt
But falsehoods, fallacies, and folderol are the order of the sweltering day here. And X commenters added a bit more perspective, reacting to the opening Mamdani story. First there’s this:
And this:
Then, finally, this:
Anyway, what explains this unrivaled leftist hypocrisy? How could people self-righteously wag their fingers at citizens who want AC while luxuriating in Cryogenian ecstasy? Three possible factors come to mind.
First, leftists specialize in self-deification and believe they’re “special.” (I’ve witnessed this personally.) Their role in this world is so unique, so indispensable, so altruistic, you see, that they deserve special dispensations. Hence the private jets, palatial abodes and multiple secondary homes, and whatever else the heart desires — including AC.
Second, people can derive self-esteem from the sense they’re part of a superior group. Being no exception, ruling-class pseudo-elites fancy themselves better than the commoners. It’s harder, however, feeling superior if the masses are enjoying the same lifestyle you do. Lifestyle level signals class identity under this mindset.
Third, many people seek government office because they crave power and enjoy controlling others. But can you experience a power-and-control rush by allowing people to do their thing and obtain whatever they want? You enjoy power and control by denying people what they want.
All this said, there’s something the AC issue reveals, something we can’t deny. The imperious statists sure have proven that, as they’ve long imagined, they really, truly are the cool kids.
