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France's record heat wave has ignited a race among buyers to acquire cooling firms, forcing a confrontation with a decades-old cultural resistance that cast air-conditioning as American excess and an environmental affront.
The squeeze is playing out most plainly at street level: Parisian hotel guests and apartment dwellers are managing with open windows and little else, a gap between infrastructure and climate that acquirers are now moving to close.
Physical Shortage, Political Overhang The absence of cooling hardware in French residential and hospitality stock is not accidental.
For years, a strain of elite opinion in France framed air-conditioning as both a cultural import to be resisted and a climate liability to be condemned.
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