We’ve heard of “painting the town red” a phrase reputedly made famous by Henry Beresford, 3rd Marquess of Waterford, but it seems we should be painting our towns white.

Hashem Akbari has a vision of a shiny, happy world. He sees polished roads and cities that gleam in the sunlight. Rooftops are bright and pavements light. Akbari wants to turn our cities into a giant mirror and he needs your help. And paint, lots of it.

Akbari is no architect and his grand plan is no conceptual art project. Based at the prestigious Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, Akbari is a scientist who has come up with a new way to fight global warming. It could be the easiest solution you’ve never heard of.

His big idea is based on principles as old as the whitewashed villages that scatter the hills of southern Europe and North Africa. Turn enough of the world’s black urban landscape white, he says, and it would reflect enough sunlight to delay global warming, and grant us some precious breathing space in the global struggle to control carbon emissions.

Akbari is poised to launch a campaign to paint the world white. He wants dozens of the world’s largest cities to unite in an effort to replace the dark-coloured materials used to cover roads and roofs with something a little more reflective. Source: The Guardian.

I’m no scientist, however it seems amazing that a white roof can reflect sunlight back out to space and to be picky, how much global warming is produced by the manufacture of white paint?