Here’s a crazy fact: If you painted 100 square feet of your roof white you could offset 1 ton of CO2. Dark colored roofs and pavement trap solar radiation rather than bouncing it back to space (and out of the earths atmosphere). Having a white roof also keeps your structure more cool and thus requires less air conditioning. The same goes for cities, an “urban heat island” is created from heat being trapped in urban areas. Mostly resulting from dark pavement, L.A. is consistently about 5 degrees hotter than surrounding areas.
If the lightening of surfaces was conducted on a large scale in hot climates, it could offset the carbon emissions created by 600 million cars over about two decades. Savings in air conditioning costs would be about $2 billion, and it wouldn’t have a great effect on heating needs in the winter. These ideas came to light when a nuclear engineer did some simple number crunching, and now he wants to see the government take some action.
I wonder what a city of white roofs would look like?
April 7th, 2009 at
Wow, do you mean I could just get up there with a roller and save on my air conditioning bill? That sounds crazy. I’ll have to follow up on this!