If there were such a book as “7 Habits of Highly Successful Planetary Civilizations,” one of those habits would be the ability to recognize and do simple things that substantially address complex problems–and to do so even if those simple things seem kind of silly at first.
Case in point: an initiative to paint (or in other ways make) rooftops and paved surfaces white in urban areas. Sounds ridiculous compared to doing fancy stuff like installing CO2 scrubbers, creating global cap and trade markets, and shooting billions of tons of greenhouse gases into geological formations, right? But there’s some compelling evidence that it would make a very big difference in delaying the effects of global warming. That it could be done cheaply and easily isn’t really up for debate.
One of the main proponents of the idea is Hashem Akbari, a nuclear engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. More from this Miller-McCune article:
Akbari, along with Surabi Menon, another LBNL scientist, and Arthur Rosenfeld, a former LBNL scientist and now a California Energy Commission board member, claim that painting urban surfaces in warm parts of the world white or a light color could offset the carbon emissions of all 600 million of the world’s cars for 18 to 20 years — at a savings equivalent to at least $1 trillion worth of CO2 reductions.
This is not a hoax: Akbari, Menon and Rosenfeld are three of the country’s leading experts in their field, and their study published in the journal Climatic Change is backed by years of carefully calculated data.
They figure that painting 100 square feet of roof space white offsets the effect of one ton of CO2 emissions. So an American family of four could offset their annual carbon emissions with 8000 square feet of white space. If cities around the world lightened all their roads, parking lots and roofs, it “would offset 44 gigatons of CO2 emissions” — or about 18 months worth of emissions for the entire human family. Overall, the three scientists figure their plan could delay the effects of global warming by 11 extra years.
The idea has been around for a long time, but the three scientists have put some very compelling numbers behind it. The findings only add weight to arguments like the one made in a 2007 Business Week article that the money we’re spending on building solar capacity as a way to address climate change would be far more effectively spent on white paint for WalMart rooftops and Food Lion parking lots. It’s kind of threatening to the techno-fix “someday we’ll all be tooling around in tidal-powered Hummers” mentality that often drives the debate around global warming solutions, but I haven’t seen any arguments that take on the substance of it.
The stimulus bill offers a perfect opportunity to jumpstart the Great Whitening. It is about a shovel-ready (roller-ready?) as a project could be, and it would be cheap, labor intensive, and immediately beneficial in several respects. First, it would improve the planetary and local climate situations. Second, it would save building owners money on air conditioning ($2 billion a year in the US alone, the scientists calculate). Third, the entire project would almost certainly cut peak electrical usage on the hottest days of summer, which really are the only times the capacity of the grid is tested. If white roofs cut total electric demand by, say, a few percent on those days, that would actually be enormous economic value both utilities and to businesses and consumers who would be less likely to suffer losses in a power outage, a la August 2003.
Certainly, the country could do a *lot* of whitening for $2 billion.
So: is anyone in Congress or at the Dept of Energy pushing for this? If not, why not? Hopefully it isn’t because John McCain would make fun of them in his Twitter feed as he did with Mormon cricket and beaver control initiatives.
Two questions do come to mind though:
* In general, spreading paint involves the release of a lot of greenhouse gases. How does that affect the overall calculus? And, is there a way to use a paint that doesn’t do this?
* Since white things tend to get dirty pretty fast in cities, how much would that lessen the calculated benefits. And how much water would be required to keep everything spic and span and high albedo?
But neither seems like a big deal. Let the Great Whitening begin!
Tags: THE GREAT WHITENING
Roofs, like windows, need to be selected for regional-compatability. As a Florida resident, when faced with the decision of a new roofing material, we chose WHITE shingles for their ability to keep the relentless regional sun/heat deflected off of our home and reduce our cooling costs. White colored shingles are the only Energy-star rated shingles available. Yes, there are greener roofing options, but they weren’t in our budget. For most people, reducing their environmental impact is more realistic that eliminating it altogether. The roofers warned us that white shingles won’t look “clean” as long as dark colored ones. If anyone wants to comment on the cleanliness of my shingles, then phooey on them.
After many years working as an energy-efficiency and renewable energy advocate in the Midwest, this year I started my own company painting flat black roofs white in the city of St. Louis, where I live. It doesn’t take a lot of financing to get started, but federal stimulus money definitely would help make things happen faster and on a larger scale, which is what’s needed to really have an impact in my community. ARRA funding is available for energy efficiency, but it’s not easy to tap into.
[...] we wrote about here and here, a trio of well-regarded scientists have argued very persuasively that all the dark [...]
[...] we wrote about here and here, a trio of well-regarded scientists have argued very persuasively that all the dark [...]
We have been using aprox. 5000 square feet of latex based white ceramic insulating paint on our shop roofs in Mobile, AL for over 10 years now. We have removed the insulation from the underside of most of the area because the racoons moved into the insulation, and have never had to reinsulate. The underside of the metal roofs remain cool. We also installed aprox. 2500 square ft directly on a prestressed concrets roof. With Its mass, that building always stays relatively cool in hot weather. Believe whatever you want about the environment, but that stuff saves us a lot of money and greatly improves employee comfort. Much better return than buying stock!
I also painted the shingles over my back porch at home because the radiation from the underside of porch roof was so bad in the afternoon you couldn’t sit back there. Now it’s like sitting under a tree in the summer on that porch.
We got used to the briteness after several days, and now never even notice it. It’s no worse than snow on the roofs up north.
perhaps if we did really look at albedo changes IN TOTAL and added WASTE HEAT EMISSIONS we might find CO2 is not even in the running for agw!
local ecologist ran a case study of a cool (silver) roof installation in Texas courtesy of Julie Ardery of humanflowerproject.com: http://localecologist.blogspot.com/2010/08/superego-hits-roof-how-we-got-cool.html.
To the comment about white roofs in regions with a winter, here’s a quote from the case study:
“Even up north, “The amount of heat savings you may lose in the winter would be, at the maximum, 30 percent of the summertime savings.””