White Roofs

I just knew it! I've thought for a long time that it didn't make any sense to have dark or black roofs on buildings, given the need to reflect sunlight back into space (to replace the melting ice caps!). Also why not have white or gray white roads instead of black ones? So about a year ago, when the roof on my rental house needed to be change, I inquired about a white roof instead of the normal black. It actually cost me about $700 more, but I figured that it would keep the house cooler (thus less air conditioning costs) plus last longer given it wouldn't get so hellishly hot.

Guess what I just found on the internet:

Is there a quick and handy way to cool down the planet? Maybe—and it might just take a few buckets of white paint and a little extra concrete. Fine, more than a few buckets, but still: The Los Angeles Times reports that Hashem Akbari, a physicist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has crunched the numbers and estimated that if the 100 biggest cities in the world simply turned all of their roofs white and used more reflective material for the pavement in their sidwalks, parking lots, and roads—concrete instead of asphalt, say—the cooling effects would be tremendous

Globally, roofs account for 25% of the surface of most cities, and pavement accounts for about 35%. If all were switched to reflective material in 100 major urban areas, it would offset 44 metric gigatons of greenhouse gases, which have been trapping heat in the atmosphere and altering the climate on a potentially dangerous scale.

That is more than all the countries on Earth emit in a single year. And, with global climate negotiators focused on limiting a rapid increase in emissions, installing cool roofs and pavements would offset more than 10 years of emissions growth, even without slashing industrial pollution.