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California May Reduce Carbon Emissions By Banning Black Cars
Legislation may by 2016 restrict the paint color options for California residents looking for a new car. Black and all dark hues are currently on the banned list. The California Air Resources Board says that the climate control systems of dark-colored cars need to work harder than their lighter siblings — especially after sitting in the sun for a few hours.
It isn't a ban on black cars. It is a requirement that at least some fraction of all solar radiation be reflected so cars don't heat up that much.
A car with "black" paint, as long as that paint reflects UV and IR, and at least scatters some light (You want a glossy paintjob anyway), combined with UV/IR reflective window treatments, will meet the requirement.
And true, it may cost $50/car to $150/car more, but on the other hand, the cars won't get so miserably hot when sitting in the sun. So it would actually benefit most consumers.
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Which is a great point. The windows. They let in a lot of heat, you can tell this because the trunk of a black car is still not nearly as hot as the rest of the car. So we should really have white interiors, and heavily reflective or tinted windows that allow us to still see out. Actually I wonder if this wouldn't be a good application of LCD windows that would turn mostly opaque when the car was off and be clear when the car was running so that cops can still peek inside and you won't have a hard time driving. Those windshield blocking things really do help, but are such a pain in the ass. If we could do that automatically, that would help a lot, I would think.
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I heard a representative of the concrete industry on NPR a couple months ago (and double-checked here) saying that the city of Atlanta reduced its average temperature by six degrees, just by switching to lighter-colored concrete instead of darker-colored asphalt. That will affect the cooling requirements of buildings, even without any change to the buildings themselves.
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Compressors turn off while you're accelerating hard, so you don't notice.
It's a really annoying feature in America's southwestern deserts: in the summer, jump on the accelerator and you catch a blast of heat in the face for your trouble. Maybe they should disable the ventilation fan at the same time to mitigate the annoyance?
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Because we have the Republicans holding the budget of the state hostage every year. I would love if we could get a higher income tax on the wealthy (of which I am one) and redo Prop 13 to only include non-income primary residences.
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