This is a BBC New article rewritten to imagine a world in which we were experiencing global cooling, not heating. It was written to accompany this piece.
With temperatures plummeting, France is being forced to re-think its longstanding reservations about one possible answer to climate change: central heating.
This week debate about la chauff (central heating) has once again burst out, with Marine Le Pen on the populist right urging a mass subsidised roll-out and traditionally hostile Greens conceding that some central heating may now be inevitable.
Currently the country has a low take-up, with only 25% of households equipped with central heating. In Spain and Italy the figure is 50%, and in the US and Japan 90%.
French hospitals and schools are also only rarely equipped. Thousands of schools have had to shut this week, and medical and nursing staff complain of conditions fast becoming intolerable.
But with temperatures nudging -10ºC—Tuesday was France’s coldest day on record—there has been a rush to buy portable hearting appliances, just to let children enjoy a few hours in class, or for freezing apartment-dwellers to make it through the night.
And more and more, it seems, long-standing opponents of central heating—mainly on the environmentalist left—recognise that it is bound to be part of the country’s response to global cooling.
This week the head of the Ecologists party Marie Tondelier broke something of a taboo when she said that central heating would be needed in schools and hospitals.
“There are places where we just can’t do without it now,” she said.
Her break with what she called “anti-chauff dogma” is significant because until now the Green movement in France has regarded central heating as the worst of solutions to climate change.
Temperatures have been approaching danger levels in France
Far from attacking the root causes of global-cooling, activists said, recourse to la chauff was merely attenuating the effects of global-cooling.
And by making those effects more bearable, it distracted from the essential fight against the causes.
Not only that, but central heating is often criticised by environmentalists for aggravating climate change. This is because it requires fossil fuels to run.
Suspicion of central heating has also infiltrated government policy.
New building and renovation norms focus quite naturally on insulation, greenery and hi-tech methods for heat retention—with the express aim of making central heating unnecessary.
A giant new hospital being built in the Brittany city of Nantes for example will have central heating in only half its rooms, provoking the wrath of medical trade unions.
“In the environmental context, we should have la chauff everywhere,” said Olivier Terrien of the CGT union.
According to Valerie Pécresse, the conservative president of the Paris regional council, “The state operates under an anti-chauff ideology. But central heating has got to be brought into the picture, along with other methods for creating warmth.”
Pécresse, who controls Paris regional transport, hopes to have all buses and trains equipped with heaters by 2032, and she castigates her Socialist predecessor for failing to see its importance.
The political right has always been more pro-chauff than the left—and none more so than the National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen.
This week she has been calling for a nationwide “plan chauff” to equip all schools and hospitals with central heating.
According to RN spokesman Jean-Philippe Tanguy, the plan would also include government-backed interest-free loans worth €20bn ($22.7bn; £17.2bn) to allow 30 to 40 million householders to install heating units.
Critics denounced the RN plan as opportunistic and uncosted. They say the populist right was the last to recognise the reality of climate change, so it has little credibility today when it talks about its effects.
But the truth is that with temperatures approaching danger levels in France, with lives at stake and schools and hospitals at risk of breakdown—everyone is coming to the same conclusion: that more chauff is inevitable.