France Decrees New Rooftops Must Be Covered In Plants Or Solar Panels

An anonymous reader writes: A law approved in France Thursday now requires all new rooftops in commercial zones to be covered in plants or solar panels. "Green roofs have an isolating effect, helping reduce the amount of energy needed to heat a building in winter and cool it in summer. They also retain rainwater, thus helping reduce problems with runoff, while favoring biodiversity and giving birds a place to nest in the urban jungle, ecologists say." The law was actually watered down from its original version — businesses only have to cover part of their roof. In other solar power news, reader SpzToid notes that despite earlier worries, the European power grid handled the solar eclipse just fine

Comments

Part of their roof?

[ArcadeMan]

It better be a minimum percentage of the roof otherwise the law will be useless.

Re:Part of their roof?

[Anonymous Coward]

And how do you define "covered in plants"? How much space between plants? Any kind of plant? What happens when your plants suddenly die?? Sounds like all the same nightmare as living in a homeowners association. "Your lawn is brown, here's a fine and it better be green next week!"

Re:Pointing out the stark, bleeding obvious...

[MickyTheIdiot]

This remind me of "sun sets, wind dies" billboards that get placed in coal mining towns. Only affective if you choose not believe in things like batteries and/or you have pushed the argument to full false dilemma status.

Re:Why not roads, too? And swimming pools?

[DrunkenTerror]

To be fair, they do at least require the pitch to be covered with plants.

Re:Decrees everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure are a lot of decrees coming from our masters who know what's best for us. Solar panels from the French. Regulated bullets, fracking, coal, networking, and healthcare policies here in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

You're right. Companies should be able to polute the rivers, pump toxins in the soil, everyone should have 50 cal machine gun nests with armor piercing bullets, coal plants should spew as much sulphur as they want, and we should let people die in the street if they can't pay for healthcare.

Hyperbole is fun!

I'll explain it to you, and I'll use small words: We all have to live together on the same planet. So people (and companies) are not allowed to do things to hurt other people. We can disagree about where to draw the line, but some of the examples you gave were stupid.

Re:Pointing out the stark, bleeding obvious...

[itzly]

If it is, then we have to take drastic measures to avoid it, and that includes shutting down most fossil fuel power plants.

800 ppm is a bigger problem than 700 ppm, and 700 ppm is a bigger problem than 600, 500 or 400. Obviously, we can't stop using fossil fuel right now. The best we can do is use less of it. That'll buy us some more time to work on the new challenges.

If it isn't, then why bother changing anything?

Even if CO2 is not a problem, fossil fuels are going to peak in production. After the peak, we'll be forced to reduce consumption.

Re:Summer cooling?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Maryland where 90 degree sunny days would regularly see 140 and sometimes 150 degree temperatures in my attic. After I put solar panels on my house the highest temp recorded in the attic was 110 degrees. This reduced the summer cooling requirements by about 1/3. My results might be slightly higher than normal though since the air return for the house runs through the attic and only has a few inches of insulation on it.