Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Los Angeles is spending $40,000 per mile painting asphalt streets white to try to prevent global warming.
Los Angeles painting city streets white in bid to combat climate change
By Travis Fedschun | Fox News
California officials are hoping their latest attempt to stem the rising tides of climate change leads to a more socially conscious — and cooler — summer.
Officials in Los Angeles have been painting streets white to reduce the effect of urban “heat islands” and combat the effects of climate change.
…
The LA Street Services began rolling out the project last May, which preliminary testing shows has reduced the temperature of roadways by up to 10 degrees. The project involves applying a light gray coating of the product CoolSeal, made by the company GuardTop.
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While each coasting could can last up to seven years, they are also pricey, with the estimated cost of $40,000 per mile, the L.A. Daily News reported.
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Outsiders might be tempted to suggest that Los Angeles has more pressing problems than the color of their streets, such as soaring rates of homelessness, drug abuse, crime and financial distress for poor people.
Obviously we outsiders have got it all wrong – the solution to Los Angeles’ horrendous social problems is taxpayer funded truck loads of white paint.
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Why didn’t they paint then gold?
This could make some folks’ lives a little more bearable. Those without airconditioning would probably be grateful for any reduction in the summer heat.
Except it will reflect the heat at their homes, depending on the angle and the time of day.
Hmmm….how will trees react to it being reflected to the underside of their leaves?
(That’s a question. I don’t know. There must be a study somewhere about that…or didn’t LA have to do an environmental impact study before going forward with this?)
Eric, you can’t make this up.
Truth is stranger than fiction…
Oh, we’re painting the roses red! We’re painting the roses red!
Recognize that? Alice in Wonderland.
Oh, we’re painting the streets white! We’re painting the streets white! Recognize that? Eric in LaLaLand. Unfortunately, only one of these stories is a fairy tale.
They’ll have to fix the potholes first.
With white epoxy?
Correction. They’re painting the streets Caucasian.
White paint? How racist is that?
Perhaps just a whiter shade of pale.
[Buy the five gallon bucket, and you get a wider pail of shade. .mod]
This truly is one of the stupidest things that I have ever heard.
In my younger days, as a person who walked a lot, both for transportation and for recreation, I often raged about city planners’ use of very light colored concrete for some of the sidewalks here on the central East coast USA. Just an off white color is damn blinding. And Calilalaland is talking about WHITE?! What total idiots!
I see sales of sunglasses spiking. They really do not get what they are about to do, in terms of upsetting visual comfort.
To say that they are blind would be both a dramatic characterization of their insight and a prediction of their future visual health.
Los Angeles should be declared an official intellectual wasteland.
Great point! What effect might that have on drivers depending on time of day?
How are crosswalks to be marked?
With black paint I guess. But I wouldn’t bet on it with this lot in charge.
In order to reduce global warming, those will be white too. But a different shade of white. /sarc
A lot of accidents would be caused by this but they don’t care because they’re saving the world by reducing its temperature by one billionth of a trillionth of a degree.
Of Course visibility at night would be much better creating the next problem night sky illumination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution
More likely it’d just make the glare of oncoming headlights and overhead streetlights that much worse.
Wouldn’t surprise me if most of those councilmen are chauffeured every where they go.
Wouldn’t this be considered discriminatory, especially being that this is in California?
Yes, this is a big art project that marginalizes all people of color in its choice of symbolic meaning. It sends the message that people of color cause problems that threaten humanity as a whole.
But carrying this a step further, insisting that a black-body radiation law says anything useful about the warming of Earth by its atmosphere is equally racist. Why a black body? Is nature biased towards white people, when it comes to the mathematics of explaining the “greenhouse effect”. Oh, and isn’t the “greenhouse effect” awfully favorable towards the color green? — what’s that supposed to symbolize? — the Irish are somehow more hot tempered or something?
We need to change the name of white paint to something else, … like “thermacure”. And “black body” needs to be changed to something like “universal body” or “gender-race-neutral body”.
LOL!
Ah, but white is a conglomeration of all the colours of the rainbow, so how can it be racist? It is far too dazzling in heat though.
BTW, this description of ‘people of colour’ always puzzles me; the entire human race is coloured some sort of colour, surely? We are varied to suit the climates we’ve come from.
Well, the new trend is to claim that science is different for everyone…
Do you mean that black bodies are worse than white bodies because they reflect less light ?
If you’re not a corpse and don’t have tuberculosis or albinism, you’re a person of color. ;|
If they gotta seal-coat anyway then it is just upping the cost from asphalt seal coat to grey stuff.
But note that the grey stuff is for light traffic areas only. Also note that the manufacturer of the grey stuff recommends about 30 gallons per 1,000 s.f. (or 4,400 gallons per typical street mile). If it lasts 10 years (not!) that’s 1 gallon/ year/10 feet of street that goes down the drains.
They are probably doing a test area, hyping it, and will decide it costs to much.
DonM
Hope the white stuff, the gray stuff, and the black street painting “stuff” are not made from hydro-carbons, do not emit volatile hydrocarbons as they cure, and are shipped, applied, and stored completely hydro-carbon free.
Now, southern California is (relatively) snow-free (so far) inside the LA basin itself. But, what will be the percent increase in accidents when the coated streets are first subjected to rain and mud? Slick streets, falls, skidding WILL increase!
What happens when the coatings get “filled up” with tire wear products, oil, and emission residue? Pollen, dust, Santa Ana grit, and salt spray from the westerly winds out near the beaches? There are reasons that “white concrete” does not stay white for long under regular traffic.
It (the grey stuff) is designed for light traffic (low use parking lot or playground … there are a few AC playgrounds still around).
A street is not low use.
Dig and we would find that the manufacturer will not honor the 12 year life guess for this type of use.
Its a hype project that will stop after one test area. But in the interim the sweeping schedule for this street section will be altered (which may just make it fail faster).
NUTS!!
You won’t be able to see the Muggers coming for the glare off the White painted Streets, This has to be a Champion Spoof.
Most states traffic laws describe required driving techniques for colored stripping. Yellow will not contrast enough with white. White stripping obviously must be changed. More money for paint producers and headaches for traffic judges. I would think the glare would be hard on drivers eyes. They probably have to buy the paint from out of state to keep the high energy needed in production from making California CO2. It does seem like there are lots of negatives and and only minor speculative positives.
“With its numerous streets and freeways, Los Angeles suffers from the “heat island” effect, which causes urban regions to become warmer than their rural surroundings, forming an “island” of higher temperatures.”
Admission of heat island effect…
Sweet!
And since most of the “temperature stations” are IN those “heat islands,” the “warming” they’re supposedly measuring is thereby admitted to be unrelated to CO2 emissions.
They’ll have to test to be sure the underside of the white paint layer doesn’t reflect IR radiation downward, making the painted street a greybody.
“Cool pavements” and “cool roofs” would potentially cut the Los Angeles summer heat island by an estimated 1 to 2 degrees (depending on a lot of factors that vary day to day such as wind, sun angle, etc). But that 1 or 2 degrees is estimated to save quite a large amount of electricity when it comes to cooling requirements and cooling is the greatest climate control expense in LA.
There are many cheaper alternative for reducing AC costs. Investigate underground thermal heat exchangers. Rehau has a good brochure that shows quite well what’s involved.
Evaporative coolers are more energy efficient than traditional air conditioning, work just as well outdoors as in, and won’t suck the air in your room bone dry. The downsides are the higher initial expense and additional water consumption.
The problem with evaporative coolers is that when everybody uses them, the air is no longer dry.
Las Vegas discovered that problem years ago.
“‘…the estimated cost of $40,000 per mile…”‘
I wonder how many pot holes they could fix at that price? How slippery is this paint going to be in the rain? Won’t they also have to paint the buildings that line the streets to get the full effect? I wonder how the home owner association Nazi’s will react to an all white scheme in their bailiwicks?
Will the pigment be titanium dioxide?
What an environmental horror!
TiO2 is relatively abundant, harvested from black sands like rutile. Has an interesting extra property. Exposed to bacteria and sunlight (the UV spectrum portion) is a potent antimicrobial. Now, this may or may not be good for the biosphere. But amounts to geobiosphere engineering.
Yeah, so we breed up antimicrobial agent resistant microbes.
Almost half of TiO2 comes from ilmenite. The sulfur and chloride conversion processes are both nasty.
And think of all the hydrocarbons that go into making paint.
If it’s slip/skid resistant it’ll be high on the dirt-pick-up index.
It won’t be white for long.
Happy cleaning!
Calastupidville . . .
Not a durable,idea. The homeless urinating and defecating on them won’t keep the white, white.
What to do?.. more white paint?
LA could set up sprinklers, misting seawater onto the streets, during the Sunniest hours.
The evaporation would lower temps and remanant salt would add plenty of whiteness.
Vehicles would reach end- of- life faster and be removed from the streets, ridding the city of legions of beaters and hordes of low- riders and si’ty- fo’s, while cutting down on evil air pollutants like CO (cough) 2. People would get more than enough of beach- like conditions and the beaches would become relatively deserted, freeing up hundreds of acres for building homeless hovels and voter registration kiosks.
Here we have a lot of salt sprinkled on to the roads with the purpose of getting rid of the white coating. Of course we also get rid of our cars much faster due to corrosion…. 🙁
Not a durable,idea. The homeless urinating and defecating on them won’t keep the white, white.
What to do?.. more white paint?
…at least they are admitting if you can counter GW with white paint….then it’s mostly UHI
Ask yourself this: Does snow on the ground keep the temperature from increasing?
Yes it does. Weathermans handbook says reduce the forecast by 5F if there is snow cover.
Now if a few roads are painted white, reduce forecast by maybe 0.01F.
Will they use a latex paint or calcium carbonate based whitewash? (if you are up on that, you were reading WUWT in the early days)
Latex is too soft to stand up to traffic.
I hope they put sand in it, or they don’t plan on driving in the rain.
And on a positive note this will have a much larger impact on lowering temps than doubling co2 would increase them.
OK, I gotta ask… What color will they paint the lane marker lines? Black? Will the guys at the city shop have to stop painting lines, clean out and change paint color every time they get to a stretch of this wonderful new roadway? Regardless, I predict a LOT of insurance claims (and law suits) arising from drivers forced to drive into a low sun angle at dawn or dusk. After all, one of the few distinctions LA still has is that it’s the home of some of the best ambulance chasers in the nation. not to mention juries that are famous for granting huge awards in accident/injury cases. The city council may find this out the hard way.
Actually you paint a slightly larger black patch then paint the white lines over that. That is how lanes are marked on the very light colored concrete pavements on Florida highways.
In some states that have a lot of concrete roadways in the south, they paint a separate stripe black right in front of or behind the white one.
Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more effective to simply put up overhead shading. Everything would be cooler under the shade: cars, pedestrians, muggers, and the homeless.
You just need a sheltered pedestrian path. The temperature difference would be sufficient to make more difference than painting the road white.
Or, you could plant some trees.
Naaa, paint the road white, much more betta. It’s useful for nobody that way.
When you pour it out of a tanker truck, and spread it with a squeegee, is it still called painting?