The geopolitics of air-conditioning
Heatwaves are making access to AC a political problem around the world.
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A man with his face covered to beat the heat riding past air coolers displayed outside a shop on a hot summer day in Varanasi, India.
PHOTO: AFP
The Economist
On a sun-baked morning in early July, with temperatures set to soar above 40 deg C, a mob in Nanterre, a Paris suburb, heaved against the doors of a Lidl supermarket until they collapsed. The sweat-stained hooligans were desperate shoppers, pitted against each other for the last portable air-conditioning (AC) unit. In another Lidl across town, two men came to blows. French politicians had a row of their own, over how much AC was too much.
At about the same time in cities across Pakistan and Bangladesh, protesters blocked roads and surrounded electricity offices during weeks of power cuts in temperatures as hot as 45 deg C. In Chandpur, Bangladesh, in late June, residents allegedly assaulted an employee of the Rural Electrification Board. In May, power cuts during a heatwave in India led to similar protests in some rural villages, where residents complained that they could not even run fans at night. In places like Iraq and Sri Lanka, too, unrest has broken out over shortages of energy needed to keep cool.
