Paris Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar blames the US for a heatwave that's killed more than 1,000 people. Her target? American air conditioning

“Dear American journalists and social media ‘influencers’: for days, some of you have been criticizing and making fun of Paris because the city does not have A/C in every room. OMG, this is so rich!” she wrote. “As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, you bear a significant amount of responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing. Your cities ‘90% air-conditioned’ are not unrelated to this. In Paris, we take responsibility.”

Overrun mortuaries

The heat wave hit its peak between Wednesday and Saturday, with temperatures hitting their highest levels in recorded history. That resulted in an estimated 1,000 excess deaths, though the final toll may take months to calculate.

Temperatures topped 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, for days. Mortuaries in Paris were so overwhelmed during the worst of the heat wave that they were forced to turn away bodies.

“Families are suffering,” Zouhaeir Hertelli, a mortuary owner, told PBS. “We have no solution to offer them, because the funeral homes are full. So we are deeply affected, we have empathy for them, but there’s nothing we can offer. We are really facing a problem, a big problem.”

Making changes

It’s situations like that which raised Pulvar’s ire. Air conditioning, she argued, “contributes and aggravates the problem” of global warming.

She did not, however, say France was blameless. Instead, she said the country was taking steps to reduce its environmental footprint and adapt the city for future climate events.

“If every American city made the same ecological transition efforts as Paris and many European cities, believe me, the whole world would be better off,” she wrote. “So please, enough with the lecture. Just start doing your part.”

Pulvar’s comments come five months after the U.S. officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for the second time. (The first time was during the first Trump administration. The U.S. rejoined in 2021 under the Biden administration.)

“All of these countries are working so hard on the carbon footprint, which is nonsense, by the way. It’s nonsense,” Trump said in an address to the United Nations last September. “You can’t turn on an air conditioner. What is that all about? That’s not Europe. That’s not the Europe that I love and know. All in the name of pretending to stop the global warming hoax. The entire globalist concept of asking successful industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and it must be immediate.”