“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.

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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.

On the rhetorical battleground, one of the strongest anti-concrete arguments has always been: “So pricey!” But perhaps that is changing. In Minneapolis, when bids came in on a project that includes new bus lanes and wider sidewalks (on Marquette and Second Aves near the convention center, for those familiar with the local terrain) the concrete and asphalt options cost more or less the same, according to a local business paper.

The underlying trend here is that asphalt’s price is closely tied to the price of oil. And when a barrel of crude when into three-digit land last year, asphalt was suddenly as expensive as concrete.

Even though the price of asphalt has come down a bit recently (according to many reports), this could still be a key moment in the debate.

We’ll take the opportunity to pick sides a bit and say we prefer using concrete whenever possible. Yes, it’s bumpy and loud to drive on and the initial construction costs have historically been a lot higher. But it’s also light of shade — that is, it absorbs a lot less heat. New concrete has an albedo as high as 0.80 (meaning it reflects about 80 percent of the sun’s heat). New asphalt has an albedo as low as 0.05 (it absorbs 95 percent). That’s a *huge* difference — greater, in fact, than the difference between snow and seawater.

As we wrote about here and here, a trio of well-regarded scientists have argued very persuasively that all the dark rooftops and roadways in our cities are heating up the planet, and we could buy a lot of time–think 20 years–in dealing with climate change if we lightened up on the double. Steven Chu, our Nobel laureate Secretary of Energy, has even weighed in in support of the idea. (We think he should put some stimulus money where his mouth is.)

We have a hunch that oil prices might headed back over $100/barrel in the next year or two. If that scenario plays out, it might offer a perfect opportunity to start migrating over to lighter pavements as a matter of national (and international) policy. Let the Great Whitening begin.

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(H/t Transportationist)

Is the Great Whitening about to begin?

As you may have read about here, a recent scientific paper has suggested that lightening roofs and paved areas in urban areas around the globe would have such a strong cooling effect that it would be like taking every car in the world off the road for 19 years. Yesterday, Steven Chu, the US energy secretary, gave a speech in Britain touting precisely this idea and variations on these stats. He even favors federal regulations to make sure it happens.

By reflecting back huge quantities of sunlight that is now absorbed by dark surfaces, whitening our roofs and roads could offset 44 billion tons of carbon emission, calculates Arthur Rosenfeld of the California Energy Commission and two colleagues. It may be one of the cheapest and most effective ways humanity can seriously address global warming in the near term.

Whitening our roofs and roads would also cut demand for air conditioning by as much as 15 percent on the hottest days of summer, which would also have the benefit of making our electrical grid more stable.

“It’s about the same cost, white versus black,” Chu noted (then made a dumb joke to all the fancy people he was speaking to that they should all switch to white limousines).

So, in the parlance, Chu gets it. (As does the influential venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.) This is a good idea that’s inexpensive, logistically simple, and has no natural opponents. That’s a rare combination, so we should really get cracking on this.

But–and here’s where we’ll be banging the drum–it should be made explicitly eligible for stimulus funding. There should be a pot of money ready to pay as much of this as can happen. It’s a cheap and quick way to create jobs, after all.

Now, who in Congress is going to this happen?

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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.

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