Paint it white

Of all the simple ideas floating around to help in an immediate way with climate change,  this one sounds cheap and good:

Global warming could be slowed by a low-tech idea that has nothing to do with coal plants or solar panels: white roofs.

Making roofs white "changes the reflectivity . . . of the Earth, so the sunlight comes in, it's reflected back into space," Chu said. "This is something very simple that we can do immediately," he said later.

Steven Chu, US Energy Secretary again. This politician acts like he won the Nobel Prize in Physics or something.  OK, so he did already (1997). Physicists are notoriously intelligent and able to see things differently from the rest of us.

Climate scientists say that the reflective properties of the color white, if applied on enough of the world's rooftops, might actually be a brake on global warming.

"We may have to figure out a way to artificially cool the planet while the atmosphere is still super-saturated with greenhouse gases," said Mike Tidwell of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. This could be it, he said, "because the planet, it's a closed system, it's an absolutely closed system, except for one thing: sunlight."

In his talk, Chu cited new research from his former laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, which imagined the result of painting white about 63 percent of the roofs white in 100 large cities in tropical and temperate areas worldwide.

It estimated that would provide about the same climate benefits as taking all the world's cars off the road for 10 years.

The local planning authority would have kittens of course. They know which way to  choose between planetary destruction and preserving character.