Tuesday 10 May 2011

painting the roses red

Facing ever hotter summers, white-washing (not green-washing) one's roofs is one many little steps that one can take to offset heat locally and perhaps decrease demands on cooling systems. It does seem to be a rather zero-sum undertaking--like a few of the environmental promotions that businesses have side-stepped since the paints are probably rather energy intensive themselves, like growing corn as biofuels. Maybe, however, there are lower impact ways to accomplish the same project, if one can get away with such things: don't upcycle someone's prized-collection, but one can gather junk compact discs and carpet roofs or make mosaics that way from charity shops and the stacks of redundant and obsolete media from work. One sees these four-hundred year old farm houses in Germany outfitted with solar arrays like steam-punk space probes. I imagine the glare from a shiny installation, as long as it does not offend one's neighbours or resident birds, would also blind the spy-satellites.