“I’d love to be hiring people,” says Jill Miller, a small business owner in St Louis. Her company, White Caps, Green Collars, specializes in painting rooftops white, a cheap and proven strategy for reducing energy consumption–and potentially a great way to put people to work. The combination of benefits suggest residential and commercial roof whitening as a perfect candidate for stimulus funding. Miller certainly thinks so. But all she’s found so far are bureaucratic dead ends. “People keep telling me what a perfect match it is,” she says. “But I can’t find the magic portal to get the funds.”
Nor, apparently, can anyone else in the “cool roofs” game. “I haven’t heard of anyone who has,” says Miller, who tracks the issue closely.Even as Congress debates the climate bill and contemplates whether stimulus funds are being spent too slowly to create enough jobs, there are apparently no efforts afoot to fund roof whitening as an effective and uncontroversial way to address both goals.
Recent scientific work suggests that if cities around the world “lightened up”–that is, made rooftops and paved surfaces more reflective–it would have the same effect as taking every car in existence off the roads for more than decade and delay the progression of global warming by approximately 20 years.
The work was done a group of scientists led by Arthur Rosenfeld of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Rosenfeld and his colleagues have studied the issue for years and argue that making our built environment whiter would be one of the most effectively immediate ways to address global warming. Even Energy Secretary and Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu seems convinced–he made reference to Rosenthal’s work at a conference last month in Britain.
Apart from the climatic benefits, roof whitening offers great rewards for homeowners. A black roof can reach 200 degrees in the summer and absorbs essentially all the destructive UV rays that hit it. A white roof won’t get above 100 degrees and doesn’t absorb much UV light at all. It will last a decade or so longer, all the while saving homeowners as much as 40% on their cooling bills.

In road-building circles, the “concrete vs. asphalt” debate is every bit as intense as that drunken discussion (eventually devolving into a weepy shouting match) every year at Thanksgiving dinner between your right-wing uncle and your pinko vegan cousin.





