“All French people” are called “not to overuse their air conditioning” because “it consumes a lot of energy”, declared the Minister for Ecological Transition, Amélie de Montchalin, this weekend. While the month of May was indeed the hottest and one of the driest ever recorded in France since the start of temperature readings by Météo France, with an average temperature +1.9 degrees above normal, the heat has sometimes been difficult to bear in certain regions. And the month of June opens on the same note with a heat record for this period of the year recorded on Saturday 4 in Cap Corse, in the north of the island of Beauty, with 37.4 degrees.
Air conditioning, mainly present in the hottest cities, therefore in the south of France, is effective in cooling a room, but it is very energy-intensive and “therefore now weighs significantly in national energy consumption and in the CO2 emissions”, alerts the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe). What to make say to Amélie de Montchalin, Sunday, on RTLthat “climate change is at work”.
Twice as many heat waves are thus to be expected by 2050, reminds Ademe, it will necessarily be necessary to consider other means than air conditioning systems to cool off this summer and the following ones.
Protect housing
The Ademe, still it, offers in a document advice to the French in order to protect their housing from too high temperatures. Among them, the protection of windows by shutters, sunshades, high winds or curtains, preferably light in color to reflect light and heat. Filling your home with plants to shade or cool the room is also a solution offered by the agency. However, if these solutions are not enough, you can still ventilate your house or apartment at the right time of day, and finally, invest in a fan.
But these solutions depend on the goodwill of individuals and Amélie de Montchalin did not give details or instructions concerning the limitations of the use of air conditioning. Moreover, “it is complicated to regulate air conditioning because it will be necessary for hundreds of homes”, estimates with L’Express François Gemenne, member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and researcher at the University of Liège. Moreover, “we cannot imagine that a climate policy is based solely on individual efforts, they cannot replace public policies”, he adds.
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The minister of the government of Elisabeth Borne wishes for her part “that we build housing differently, that we isolate them, that we reduce our electricity consumption”. Better insulation of housing makes it possible to limit the heat inside but also the cold when the temperatures are low, and thus reduce energy consumption. “Many people still live in very poorly insulated housing and will suffer from heat waves, this is particularly the case in Marseille which has an absolute need for thermal renovation of housing”, abounds François Gemenne.
Other ideas, picked up by Le Figarocan also be envisaged at the time of construction, such as the Provençal well which supplies a dwelling with fresh air through a duct buried in the ground, or dwellings on the model of the Creole houses which already exist in the Oversea territories.
Refresh the cities
More broadly, there are various means of cooling living environments, starting with cities which generally concentrate the strongest heat because they constitute heat islands, made up of tar and concrete. Traffic and pollution make the heat peaks particularly stifling. But here again, the public authorities have the possibility of softening the perceived temperature.
In its latest report, the IPCC thus calls for a rethinking of urban areas “through reduced energy consumption (for example by creating compact and walkable cities), the electrification of transport in combination with energy sources at low emissions and better carbon absorption and storage using nature”. We can consider the multiplication of plant areas, “between streets lined with trees and streets without trees, we can have a difference of three to four degrees”, according to François Gemenne. The water points also make it possible to lower the temperature, but also to change the color of the roofs, a “soft geo-engineering” track. Painting a roof white also lowers the temperature by reflecting heat. The choice of materials is also decisive. Materials such as wood or stone are considered to be particularly effective and low-conductive insulators.
“Several cities and towns have already started to act. The metropolis of Lyon is already using anti-heat paint, which has made it possible, in the streets concerned, to reduce the temperature from 47°C to 37.9°C”, told L’Express, Fanny Petitbon, advocacy manager at Care France. For its part, the City of Paris made a commitment in 2004 by carrying out an initial assessment of the territory’s energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, and then adopted in 2007 a “Climate plan“, rich in 500 measures undertaken “in several fields of action (building, transport, energy, food, waste, living environment, mobilization, finance…)”, specifies the city website.
If we cannot therefore say that nothing has been done, “this remains insufficient in view of the challenges that await us”, decides the IPCC expert, especially since these proposals “are not very expensive, are quick to carry out and are quite consensual from a political point of view”. But according to the specialist, “we still have in the collective imagination the idea that we are going to escape a series of impacts of climate change, this idea that heat waves are still exceptional events”.
Fight against climate change
It is therefore necessary to arrive at this observation, as distressing as it is, in order to achieve the rapid implementation of solutions that are sometimes simple, effective and inexpensive to fight against extreme heat. More generally, to limit the multiplication of extreme climatic phenomena, the fight against climate change on a large scale and in the long term remains decisive and depends more on public authorities than on individual awareness. “Reducing our greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible is the first solution”, sums up François Gemenne.
“The government must accelerate the ecological transition, invest massively and quickly in the renovation of housing, support the most precarious and develop soft mobility plans”, then calls Fanny Petitbon for whom “we need to get into the concrete”. She regrets that “the emphasis is placed on small gestures in the face of the alerts constituted by the IPCC reports, the heat waves in India and Pakistan, the drought in France…” and recalls that “France has been doubly condemned for climate inaction and must come out of illegality by the end of the year”.
The European Parliament is precisely this Tuesday looking into a “climate package” aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030, compared to emissions in 1990. In addition, Emmanuel Macron, who entrusted ecological planning to its Prime Minister, pledged in February to increase tenfold photovoltaic capacity by 2050, to exceed 100 gigawatts.