There are billions of miles of black asphalt roadways on Earth, okay maybe 50 million miles. Would you believe 5 million? These roads of fossil fuel as tar and crushed rock both absorb the energy of light from the sun and retain and radiate that energy back upwards as heat, heating up our liveable lower atmosphere and that heat is also wasting a lot of energy as hot road beds, hot roadsides, and hot road kill. White Roads would make a significant difference if industrialized nations would just do it. But besides those evil roads, there are a lot of sources of heat where there wouldn’t not be if it were not for our human existence.Problems in our control:
- Urban Heat Islands, From the FY 2003 Report on NASA's Earth Science Enterprise (ESE): “NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) was successfully launched in January 2003. SORCE is studying the Sun’s influence on Earth and will measure how the Sun affects the Earth’s ozone layer, atmospheric circulation, clouds, and oceans . . . . New evidence from NASA Earth observation systems and Earth science models reveals how urban areas, with their asphalt, buildings, and aerosols, are impacting local and possibly global climate processes . . .”
- 5 million cattle walking around eating and mooing, maintaining a temperature while outdoors (you try doing that naked!), farting methane gas, crapping pies in the fields that stay nice and warm for about a half hour – hey its just a guess. The gas does not break down in the atmosphere to be recycled as carbon dioxide and so contributes to the dense layer of “undigested” complex gases we call “greenhouse.”
- Cars burning fossil fuels. Engine blocks reaching 300 degrees Fahrenheit on hot days or cold days. In America there are at least 2 motor vehicles registered for every driving aged person.
- Household heat: Everything from water heaters which inefficiently leak heat, to boilers which throw at least %70 of their heat into a chimney flu and up, to black asphalt roofing tiles, black tar driveways, plumbing vents which channel hot water steam and its associated heat up and out the roofs of each home, and channel methane gas from the human occupants upward and out as well.
- That darn NASA sending rockets into orbit all the time (it seems). Did you ever see the flames on those things? Man!
Benefits of White Road:
This is all a picture of a large footprint of impact on the planet, and the footprint can be made by one person in one day. But he might not eat a whole cow in one day, unless he’s American. He or she can reduce each part of this footprint, each day. And in many cases, the whole thing. Personally, I would prefer life in a jungle hut, with women, scratch that – one nice woman, and smoking dynamite weed, and having a very tiny ecological footprint.
But White Roads (WR) would be an excellent economic advancement. The scale of the projects in the industrialized world would employ, and re-employ tens of millions, much like the Eisenhower revitalization of the Roosevelt Highway initiative post World War II, had done for work starved veterans. Employment would be needed for the tire manufacturing as all new tires would have to be made of white rubber through and through as to not mark up the new roads. Motor oil would have to be clear or white to avoid those ugly stains.
For safety we’ll all realize that the roads should have been bright white to begin with. A WR would be more visible, as its sides, and its horizon image would jump out at a dreary driver, or a rain storm driver watching through windshield wipers. Exits two or three miles ahead would be visible to any driver with half a brain and eyeballs. Bumps absent of brightness would demarcate the center of every road. Gone are the expensive reflective ceramic roadway markers that have marked roads for so long, i.e. the Dobson’s Bumps of the California Transportation System.
Finally, not so much cooling. But an absence of intense heating via a product we can control and change by our own doing. Have you ever walked on a black-top barefoot? Hurts does it not? A normally 115 dg. road might be only 90 dg. midday.
From around the blogs on this subject:
From around the blogs on this subject:
At Half Baked.Com
“Ice also melts faster on black roads. Would white roads then require lots more rock salt, leading to faster car corrosion, big changes in local water chemistry, airborne pollution from rock salt manufacture/transport, &c.? Would the white roads themselves require more (or less) energy- intensive manufacturing and maintenance? How would they affect accident rates (daytime vs. night-time, of course)?”
“There's a stretch of I-40 in North Carolina that's very light gray with both black and white lane markings (black for day, white reflective for night). Kind of a prototype... croissant.”
“If we paint the roads white by using spray cans, does it all cancel out?”
“I'm voting against the idea because it's incredibly racist.”
“White roads would reflect light as light. Black roads reflect (re-emit) light as heat. (Infra red.) Greenhouse gases trap heat (IR), not light. White roads would cool Earth.”
“The light deflected off the planet would also make Earth quite a good space lighthouse when star-travel moves into full swing.”
“Black absorbs heat. Roads are black. Roads absorb heat. Lots of roads absorb lots of heat. Lots of roads criss-cross Earth.”
“White deflects heat. Roads are white. Roads deflect heat. Lots of roads deflect lots of heat. Lots of roads criss-cross Earth . . .”
“Also many people, more born every second. Hair scatters light--no good. Mandatory baldness, and heads painted white. Much better! Everyone squinting all the time. And writing in short sentences too.”
