I don't know anyone who is really that aesthetically attached to dark roofs and blacktop, so why aren't roads and roofs white?
Painting roofs white would seem a relatively easy project that woud provide jobs and mitigate global warming. If Steven Chu believes the project is worthwhile then I have to ask why projects of this sort are not being funding in the stimulus or in proposed new jobs bills. While there are certainly issues concerning the variety of roofing materials, surely the technical obstacles are not insurmountable. Recovering with white material would work.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...
In fact, why stop at roofs? What about roads and parking lots? Adding a white coloring ingredient to blacktop would have been a common sense thing to do decades ago, as anyone who has walked in a parking lot on a hot Summer's day knows. The stimulus bill contained billions for highway projects. Repaving projects paid for with federal funding should require new road surfaces to be white with dark traffic lines.
White surfaces are certainly not the cure for global warming, but it is a simple, common sense way of cutting down on a building's fuel needs and lowering the temperature in crowded urban areas.