All of Europe is wilting under the heat, and Paris is burning. “This is a humanitarian catastrophe, a major crisis for our country,” said Dr. Patrick Pelloux, the president of the association of emergency room physicians in France. What’s worse, it’s a tragedy that could have been partially averted, because many of those who died in the European heat wave could have been saved by a 100-year- old technology: air conditioning.

Last year was the centennial anniversary of the air conditioner. Willis Carrier, a heating company engineer, built the first system that was successfully used to cool air, installed on Jul 17, 1902 in a printing plant in Brooklyn, New York (patented in 1906 as the “apparatus for treating air”). Ever since, the air conditioner has been vilified in elite society as a sign of weakness and sloth. President Franklin Roosevelt was a staunch critic. The playwright Henry Miller wrote that conditioners were “crutches which have paralyzed us. We have not grown more human through our discoveries and inventions, but more inhuman.”

It took half a century for attitudes to change. In 1950, only one percent of U.S. households had air conditioning units; today, over 80 percent do. The air conditioner is now standard office equipment, making workers more productive, since they no longer need to be sent home or encouraged to rest during intense summer heat.

But now consider France, where energy taxes are oppressive when compared to other Western countries. French health officials expect thousands more people, mostly elderly, to swelter to death this summer under the brutal heat. Yet the mean summer temperature in Paris is the same as in Detroit, Chicago, and Denver. But in those cities, as Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia has demonstrated, there’s no proportional number of excess deaths when the mercury rises.

In fact, heavily modernized cities like Houston in the hot, humid deep south of the United States have never shown any mortality increases related to escalating temperatures. Why? Cheaper, more available energy powering air- conditioned houses, offices, and cars. Did you notice, in the Great Blackout, that Texas on its own power grid, kept it’s power running? Coincidence?

The lesson of the Great Blackout is increasingly clear: restricting energy use can be deadly. Taxes, energy-efficiency standards, and other environmental rules have made home air conditioning more expensive than it should be in many jurisdictions. A 1996 New England Journal of Medicine study concluded that over half of the 700 deaths in the 1995 Chicago heat wave could have been avoided had air conditioning been more affordable. In St. Louis, 16 of the 36 people who died in that city’s 1999 heat wave were in dwellings without working air conditioners.

Heat waves are still responsible for over 400 deaths in the United States each year, more than those caused by tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes combined. Admissions to hospitals for near-fatal heat stroke also put a strain on cash-starved, overflowing intensive-care units. One handicapped young man died when the vital air conditioning he required gave out during Ontario’s recent power outage.

Air conditioning saves lives and is a huge net benefit to the economy. Surely any conservation measures that impose restrictions on its use must be justified on a cost-benefit basis. Yet rather than focusing its attention on producing more energy, and building a more reliable power grid, the Ontario government has launched an ad blitz to encourage people to reduce their reliance on air conditioning. A better approach would be to deregulate and privatize the system such that Ontario consumers pay the real cost of power and weigh the costs and benefits of AC themselves rather than letting the government do it for them.

Meanwhile, Ontario NDP leader Howard Hampton evidently wants more expensive air conditioning for everyone, since he thinks only public power will cure Ontario’s energy woes. “The air conditioning in my office will be off, but Ontario needs a strategy that will get us beyond the next week,” he thumped in a press release.

And so, the war on air conditioning marches on. An August 20 editorial in the Waterloo Record, titled “We need a Jolt of Straight Talk,” asked: “Can we afford the high-priced illusion created by air conditioning that we needn’t be hot in the summer?” A better question might be, “Can we afford not to turn on the AC?” Just ask the French.