Los Angeles Begins Painting Streets White to Combat Climate Change

Officials in Los Angeles have undertaken quite an interesting project – paint city streets white to reduce the effect of urban “heat islands” and combat the effects of so-called climate change.

The LA Street Services began the undertaking last May.

For the first time in the Golden State, it is testing a reflective street surface officials say could cut public road temperatures, cool the insides of nearby buildings, lessen air pollution and reduce the threat of deaths linked to increasingly hotter heat waves.

Before afternoon temperatures could push 100, city street workers spread a thin gray coating of CoolSeal into the heart of one of its hottest neighborhoods.

“The city’s going to get hotter because of climate change, particularly this neighborhood of the west San Fernando Valley,” said Greg Spotts, assistant director of the Bureau of Street Services, who doubles as its acting chief sustainability officer. “The phenomenon called the heat island effect means the city is hotter than the surrounding countryside.

“We’re exploring ways to reduce the heat island effect by reducing the absorption of heat in the built environment.”

Street Services, working in conjunction with GuardTop LLC, an asphalt coating manufacturer based in Dana Point, had first tested the cool pavement seal in the Sepulveda Basin.

Asphalt at a parking lot at the Balboa Sports Complex once averaged 160 degrees in summer. After the seal was applied two years ago, company officials say, surface temperatures dropped to between 135 to 140 degrees.

Now, after rigorous testing for durability and wet skid potential, the CoolSeal coating was being slathered across a half block of Jordan Avenue just north of Hart Street near the headwaters of the Los Angeles River.

If the new seal could boost solar reflectivity —and dramatically cool a street lined with two-story apartments in the hottest region of the San Fernando Valley — it could do it anywhere, city officials said.

The experiment will soon be duplicated in 14 other council districts before the end of June. If successful, city officials hope to encourage manufacturers to help develop cool pavement that could be incorporated into a multimillion-dollar drive to fix a backlog of L.A.’s failing streets.

“I’m thrilled to be here. This is a great day for all of us. We look forward to seeing what the results will be,” said Kevin James, president of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.

A CoolSeal coating could cost an estimated $40,000 per mile and last seven years, city officials said. But that’s subject to change pending pavement innovation.

“We’re going to try to make Los Angeles as cool as possible,” said Jeff Luzar, national sales director for GuardTop, a privately owned firm that has covered coated mostly playgrounds and parking lots. “We’re going to be the coolest island in Southern California.”

Painting the streets white isn’t only stupid because of the whopping cost to lay all that paint down, but in maintenance to keep them clean from all the black tires.

All that white will also cause a condition known as photokeratitis, or ‘snow blindness’:

Photokeratitis is a painful eye condition that occurs when your eye is exposed to invisible rays of energy called ultraviolet (UV) rays, either from the sun or from a man-made source.

Photokeratitis is like having a sunburned eye. This condition affects the thin surface layer of the cornea — the clear front window of the eye — and the conjunctiva, which is the cell layer covering the inside of the eyelids and the whites of the eye.

And if the blindness isn’t bad enough in and of itself, LA residents can surely expect an increase in car accidents as a result.

But no collateral damage is bad enough for liberals when it comes to the planet. Right? Well, in classic the liberal form of making their imaginary problems worse by implementing crazy solutions, any so-called global warming would be amplified because all that heat will simply be reflected upwards instead of being absorbed by the street.

But don’t expect them to admit the folly in their design. The only way to make them change their minds about this project is to claim that painting the streets white is racist.

Source: Daily News, AAO