Ahhhh …. I know what you were thinking but what I want to talk about is heat. If you were paying attention in general science sometime around seventh grade, you would know that the darker in color something is, the more heat it absorbs. Or just living life, you might have noticed this phenomenon. An observation I have had is that America, and many portions of the world, are covered with road. Many of these roads are ‘blacktop’ or asphalt. These roads are at minimum dark, if not black, and they absorb a lot of heat. In the US, people love to make their asphalt as black as possible.
The old asphalt is already dark and absorbing a lot of heat. Wait, I have a good idea, lets make it even darker!
In our community, our pavement is in very good shape. Yet every three years or so, they coat the top with black sealer. Our sun in Southern California is very strong. I take some pride in not using our air-conditioning unless we really have to. Our asphalt absorbs a lot of heat and must slow the cooling in the evening. Why do we need to make it even darker? If our roads really needed the sealer to make them last longer, maybe I would understand. But they do not!
According to Wikipedia, there are approximately 4,071,000 miles of roads in the United States. Of that total, 2,678,000 miles are paved; leaving 1,394,000 miles unpaved. Apparently less than 1 percent of the land area of the U.S. is covered by roads, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The total land area of the contiguous 48 states is 2,959,067 square miles. In the US, the area devoted to roads and parking lots covers an estimated 61,000 square miles. That is bigger than the state of Georgia. That is a lot of sun absorbing area. How much has that heated the planet? What does this look like across our planet?
That is a lot of roads!
I am sure you have seen the buildings in Greece where everything is white. And why have they done that for many years? The simple answer is the sun is strong and it makes no sense to absorb heat when it is already hot. This certainly is not my idea, but why not make all our roads white? And in some places this is being done. Further, as I world warms, should we not be exploring as many ways as possible to keep it cooler?
This seems to make a lot of sense. Obviously it performs better and the stats are discussed in the video above. I wonder why this is not getting more ‘coverage’ and use?