THE EUROPEAN MIND CANNOT COMPREHEND THE GLORIES OF AMERICAN AIR CONDITIONING: The new hot topic in European politics is air conditioning.
The prospect of U.S.-style air conditioning sends shivers through some Europeans. In France, media outlets often warn that cooling a room to more than 15 degrees Fahrenheit below the outside temperature can cause something called “thermal shock,” resulting in nausea, loss of consciousness and even respiratory arrest. That would be news to Americans who expect indoor temperatures to be cooled to around 75 degrees even when it is near 100 outside.
Not that I was worried, but I’m glad to see that all Texas restaurants, movie theaters – and Buc-ee’s — are marked safe from a French invasion during the summer months.
Not surprisingly, this story has caught the eye of Joel Abbott of Not the Bee, the straight news spinoff of America’s Newspaper of Record:
The Wall Street Journal frames this debate as a consequence of impending climate change (of course), but climate fear-mongering aside, there is a very real cost to human life that comes from heat waves, particularly to the very young and very old.
Experts say more air conditioning is a necessity to prevent thousands of people from dying during heat waves.
That’s an understatement:
More:
‘Abroad, the contrast is striking: the United States is investing several billion dollars to modernize the air conditioning of its schools, while hospitals there are already largely air-conditioned,’ read legislation proposed by French conservatives this month that would require air conditioning installed in institutions across the country.
How in the world does France not have air-conditioned hospitals?? How am I just learning this now?!
Indeed. In 2000, when Tom Wolfe wrote “Hooking Up: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American’s World,” he wasn’t kidding when he noted, “On his trips abroad, our [American] electrician, like any American businessman, would go to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated in European hospitals, which struck him as little better than those in the Third World. He considered European hygiene so primitive that to receive an injection in a European clinic voluntarily was sheer madness.”