How the little-known ‘dark roof’ lobby may be making US cities hotter
How the little-known ‘dark roof’ lobby may be making US cities hotter
www.theguardian.com
How the little-known ‘dark roof’ lobby may be making US cities hotter
22 comments
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From the same publication:
Painting roofs white and creating lighter coloured pavements and roads are recognised as ways to reflect heat in urban areas and help combat global heating. However, a new study shows that this geoengineering technique unexpectedly causes temperatures to rise in the surrounding region.
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We have hundreds of years of history where civilizations have concluded that white roofs are cooler. We have decades of modern academic research that backs that up.
One study indicating the opposite may be true in some cases is not sufficient evidence to start overturning legislation. It's not enough to start submitting to the lobbying of these huge corporations trying to sell darker roofing materials. It IS enough to call for more research into the matter, and if enough research confirms this new finding THEN we start changing laws.
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So if everyone has a white roof, the perimeter heating effect would be negated?
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In most of the populated areas of the world we use a lot more energy to heat our buildings than we use to cool them. More people die of cold exposure than of heat. Warming up is good for us.
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I hate to be this sort of guy. But if you had read the article it mentions a study that found exactly the opposite of what you claim.
Researchers have also found that even in most cold North American climates, the energy savings from cool roofs during warmer months outweigh any added heating costs in the winter.
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Yep, mostly becuase cold climates are high latitude and they don't get a ton of free BTUs from the sun all winter anyway. An exception might be lower latitude, high altitude areas (just guessing). I'd also guess that people doing white roofs are more likely to do basic air sealing and insulation retrofits.
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It's just not true.
North America & Europe (temperate/cold climates) Heating dominates. In the U.S., for example, space heating accounts for roughly 2–3× more total energy than cooling on an annual basis, especially in northern and central states. In Europe, cooling demand is tiny in comparison — many countries use almost no air conditioning outside southern regions.
Why heating dominates overall:
- Large parts of North America and Europe have long winters.
- Heating often uses high-energy fuels (natural gas, oil, electricity), so the energy content is higher even if cooling is more frequent in some places.
- Cooling is mostly electric and can be efficient with modern A/C systems, so it consumes less energy per degree of temperature change compared to heating.
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22 comments
Abolish HOAs too, they heavily restrict anything visible on your house and to anyone saying just don't buy a house with an HOA a good 95-99% of homes around me are in HOAs.
In case anybody is wondering why that is, it's because local governments heavily encourage developers to establish them in order to shirk their responsibility to maintain public infrastructure and shift that liability onto the homeowners more directly (compared to paying for it through taxes). This is necessary because single-family houses are revenue-negative and bedroom communities without a substantial dense (i.e. tax profitable) downtown can't afford to subsidize them in the long run without going bankrupt.
In other words, all these suburban neighborhoods of single-family houses are ticking time-bombs that will devastate somebody's finances in a few decades when the streets need to be repaved. The purpose of HOAs is to make sure that that "somebody" is the homeowners themselves in order to contain the damage.
The real issue is that forcing development to be low-density and therefore financially unsustainable is fundamentally the wrong thing to do to begin with, and forcing people to be subject to capricious privatized HOAs is just the shit icing on the shit cake.
My previous house was in a tiny city (0.9ish square miles) that had no hoa and had some of the absolute best municipal areas, parks, and events of anywhere I have seen. The costs of that were baked into the property taxes paid to the city and they never had any issues. We had code enforcement but they were largely unintrusive.
Where I moved to has good parks but the hoa is mental. I would not have moved out of my old city if the houses were bigger but we just outgrew our house with our kids.
Point is, if you set it up right, the funds are there. If you want to be a shitty city and buck responsibility HOA's allow that, same with MUD's and LID's. Its all privitization of stuff governments are supposed to provide from tax revenue.
Talk to your representative. The state makes the rules hoa's like by.
hoa can be useful, but many get bogged down on things they should not.
I wish that would be effective but I am in Texas...
HOAs do have their uses. Better to get involved and fix yours. It's literally the most local and direct political change you can be a part of.
You also never hear about the good ones because people don't bitch about them every chance they get.