Can't Afford Solar? Paint It White
| Tue Sep. 16, 2008 5:26 PM PDT
Your roof, that is. A new study calculates that installing white roofs in the world's cities could offset 1.5 years of manmade carbon emissions, reports AAAS.
Light-colored roofs cool the planet in two ways. They reflect radiation back into space. And they keep your house cooler so you use less air conditioning.
Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the state of California estimated the global number of roofs and asphalt surfaces in cities and conservatively estimated they comprise 1 percent of Earth's surface. They then found that using light-colored concrete, or applying white glazes to buildings, could increase the reflectivity of urban surfaces by 10 percent, effectively negating 44 gigatons of CO2. In comparison, halting deforestation of tropical forests would eliminate about 7 gigatons of emissions.
Total global annual emissions from fossil fuels are currently running at about 28 gigatons.
The new snow: paint.
Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal Award.
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Comments
Submitted by Fair Trade (not verified) on Wed Sep. 17, 2008 1:39 AM PDT.
It will be interesting to see whether this relatively simple solution gets any support from any government initiatives... sadly I don't think it will - our governments are full of more hot air than most Californian attics.
Nancy,what do you have against Black? You must be David D's sister.
How about in winter time. You want to warm up the building with a black roof, saves on heating bills. Ever think you black rubber containers of water on the roof to warm up the water to use in heating in the winter and hot water. You people have no imagination. You need to expand you mind.
See there is an argument for black. White people sometimes fail to understand that not everything has to be white all the time.
In my Island home of Bermuda everyone has a white lime-washed roof that collects rainwater and is stored in a large cement tank . During a power outage due to a hurricane we still can dip a bucket in the tank . Our entire house is made of stone (roof too) so it cant burn down . Bermudians have been doing this for over 400 years .Everyone in a warm latitude should do this . My 250 year old house stays cool on the hottest days helped by the water in the tank that are my bedroom walls. No need for airconditioning.Im always baffeled by American construction.They wouldnt last 5 years here, the wood would rot or be blown away in a storm.
http://www.thebermudaroof.com/
Seems like a good idea, and a simple one. Perhaps even OUR action-challanged political system could actually approve the implementation of such an idea.
However, a couple of things really bother me about the way this article is actually written because they could lead to misunderstandings and/or provide ammunition for undermining much needed carbon emmission reductions -- (A) by saying "effectively negating 44 gigatons of CO2", Julia seems to be mistakenly implying that reflected sunshine can somehow reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. This is clearly untrue. It might be closer to the truth to say instead "the effect of 44 gigatons of CO2 could be offset". (..A small, but very important nuance of language); and (B)by stating "In comparison, halting deforestation of tropical forests would eliminate about 7 gigatons of emissions"...Julia could inadvertantly be handing deforesters ammunition to argue that painting roofs white should be undertaken INSTEAD OF reducing tree cutting? Perhaps a better way of getting the comparison across could have been found, while reminding readers that keeping our trees means we actually benefit in many other ways -- such as helping to keep the oxygen we need to breath which is provided to us for free by our global forest. (Of course there are LOTS of other good, intrinsic, reasons to keep trees around, not just the ecosystem service reasons that may be of direct benefit only to mankind...We should try to get away from always being so anthropomorphic in our reasons for saving the other species and ecological processes of Earth.)
