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Bill Clinton Says 'Paint Your Roofs White'
Hugh Pickens writes "Former President Bill Clinton thinks 'every black roof in New York should be white; every roof in Chicago should be white; every roof in Little Rock should be white. Every flat tar-surface roof anywhere! In most of these places you could recover the cost of the paint and the labor in a week.' Noting that Mayor Bloomberg started a program to hire and train young people to paint New York's roofs white, Clinton says a big percentage of the kids have been able to parlay this simple work into higher-skilled training programs or energy-related retrofit jobs. The benefit: not only will 'cool roofs' lower the utility bill in every apartment house 10 to 20 percent, but it frees cash that can be spent to increase economic growth. Clinton presented this with fourteen additional ideas for growing the economy, saving energy, and attacking the jobs crisis."
Look. Just because somebody thought of something you haven't doesn't make them dumb. People have been talking about this for years, and *yes* they've taken into account the fact that you'd like to get solar heating from your roof in the winter.
You don't get much solar heating in the winter at the latitude of New York because the days are short and the sunlight oblique. New York is at roughly 40 degrees of latitude, and midwinter the sun rises to less than 30 degrees of elevation off the horizon.
The argument might make sense for La Paz, Bolivia, but not New York.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The difference is even greater because in the winter, there is less sunlight to do the heating. The savings during the summer win hands down. If the power goes out, the color of the roof is not going to make an appreciable difference--unless maybe you sleep in the attic. Never heard of anybody doing that.
Anyone else have any requests for shit for me to do while I'm in 2000?
Yeah, make home owners associations illegal.
They were supposed to be for paying for common areas (tennis courts, pools, etc...) and to keep Mr. Trash from putting his car on blocks in his front yard and his pack of dogs in the back. Now, they've turned into fascist organizations that will have their lawyer fine you and charge you thousands of dollars because you used the wrong color of beige on your front door.
Why Home Owner's Associations bring down property values:
1. if you live near folks who do those kinds of things, an HMA isn't gonna do you much good AND if you do need an HMA then you have trash living there.
2. Some of them have resale fees buried in the covenants and sometimes hidden by the real estate developer - bunch of fucking crooks in on it with the bankers.
Now, I'm going to make some sweet and sour sauce with this bitterness.
1)Ridge vents can only be installed on pitched roofs. Many large buildings do not have pitched roofs.
2)Painting a roof white requires no permits, construction, tools (save paintbrushes and maybe brushes/cleaning solutions), specialized skills, etc.
3)Titanium Dioxide, used to make many white paints white, is a photo-catalyst, which means it can self-clean and chew up pollutants in the air.
4)A ridge roof vent that is controllable requires control systems and whatnot. White paint simply works.
#2 is particularly important for people with few vocational skills...and landlords who, especially in NYC, are really, really cheap assholes who view tenants as human ATMs, and who won't do anything unless there's a quick, proven payback.
Clinton's point is that white paint is cheap, easy, simple, reliable, has virtually no operational expenditure, and a quick payback. Installing ridge vents shares almost nothing in common with his solution.
Please help metamoderate.
We live on the top floor of a small apartment building that has a flat roof, and with the landlord's permission, I painted it with aluminized roof coating at the end of last summer. I can now definitely state that our interior temperatures are about 10 F cooler than last summer (hey, we're geeks, we measured it). We still go above ambient, but only about 5 F instead of 15 F. It went from intolerable (there is no A/C) to not-so-bad, and the rest of the building shares the benefit, although much less than we do.
I can't speak to how much more energy we're using during the winter because we don't see those figures and didn't think of a way to measure it (like duty cycle of the heater on our floor) in time.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.