00:00Well, Dr. Yamina Saheb is a lecturer and researcher at Sciences Po and a co-founder of the World
00:07Sufficiency Lab.
00:08She joins me now.
00:10Thank you very much indeed.
00:11Air conditioning then is becoming a hot topic, if you excuse the pun, especially in France.
00:17What are the issues here?
00:20Well, air conditioning is the argument and the only argument used by the far right party
00:27in France.
00:28This is why it became a hot political topic.
00:31It's unfortunate because when you talk about air conditioning, you don't talk about the
00:36causes of the heat waves and the causes of climate change.
00:39And unfortunately, the other parties and the French media, they all felt in this trap.
00:45So all the discussion during the last two weeks has been about, are you against or in favor
00:52of air conditioning?
00:54And nothing about the causes of what has led us to this situation.
00:58Do you think there's a case for making the calling of places like schools, hospitals
01:04and care homes mandatory?
01:07So there is a case for looking for reorganizing our society, the French society, the way we
01:15work and including our infrastructure and including our buildings and many buildings where you have,
01:22as those you mentioned, schools, daycares, hospitals, etc., to prepare them for the upcoming, the following heatwaves that we are
01:34going to have.
01:34However, the first step to avoid stress on the grid, on the electricity grid, and to ensure that everyone has
01:47access to a comfortable space or a cool space in summer and a warm space in winter.
01:54The first step is to work on the urban planning level and then the building level with the sheddings, etc.
02:02In the urban planning, if you are in Paris, for example, you will see that we do like trees in
02:07many, in most of the places.
02:08And then when you look at the buildings, there are no blinds, there are no shutters, and all these little
02:14things will limit the time of the use for mechanical cooling.
02:21Mechanical cooling through air conditioning should be the last step.
02:24And what is wrong in the debate today is that they debate about the last step.
02:30And within the last step, which is the air conditioning, they look at only the existing air conditioning solutions, which
02:38use refrigerants that increase global warming, and which are also individual solutions.
02:47While we do have, for example, if you look at Paris, most of the buildings are, we do live in
02:53multi-family buildings, so it will be wrong and not possible, actually, to have individual air conditioning everywhere in Paris.
03:01And I guess this is part of a broader strategy.
03:04We need to look at also better buildings, more shade, greener cities, too, as well as air conditioning.
03:11Is it a case of trying to get a strategy that unites all of those things together?
03:15Yeah, the strategy is to have sufficiency, which is all the measures that avoid up front the demand for any
03:24mechanical or electrical solution that would consume more resources.
03:28And this is about shadings, about how buildings are designed, about how we organize our societies.
03:34So, for example, we could decide, we will, it will, it will occur at some point that we will decide
03:40that if we have heatwaves, because we will have more and more of this kind of heatwaves, that we stop
03:47the schools earlier.
03:48But when you stop the schools earlier, this means that you need to offer solution.
03:52So, we should have places, cool places, where families could go.
03:56And this means it has implications for work as well.
03:59This means that those who have kids should be freed from work to take care of their kids in these
04:05cool places.
04:06And all this must be organized.
04:08And what is missing today is that we don't have all these first steps.
04:11That's the first step.
04:12It is sufficiency.
04:14It is about avoiding the demand for all natural resources while ensuring well-being for all within planetary boundaries.
04:21Second step is that we will always need technologies.
04:25When we need technologies, they must be as efficient as possible, these technologies.
04:30And we should not lock ourselves in technologies from the previous century.
04:33We should look for technologies that allow us to avoid or limit the overshoot of planetary boundaries.
04:39And then the third step, which is about ensuring the supply of energy with renewable energy production,
04:48because most people mix up the argument is that because we have nuclear energy,
04:53so we have abundant electricity in France, which is not the case when you have the heatwaves.
04:59So, we have several nuclear reactors that are closed because nuclear power plants need to be cooled.
05:05And when you have heatwaves, you have a cooling issue of nuclear power plants as well.
05:09So, really, if we don't work on the first step, the first step, which is sufficiency,
05:13this is the one that will bring 70% of the savings and well-being.
05:17And if we skip this step and we go to the following steps, only technologies,
05:22and we select the wrong technologies, then we will lock ourselves in more deadly heatwaves.
05:29Yamina Shaheb, thank you very much indeed for that.
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