ForConstructionPros.com

During a climate change symposium in London earlier this year, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said white roofs and concrete surfaces can help stop global warming. His quote: "If you take all the buildings and make their roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of color rather than a black type of color, and you do this uniformly… it's the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars on the road for 11 years; you just take them off the road for 11 years."

Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, didn't just pull this statistic out of his hat - it's based on data generated by Dr. Art Rosenfeld of the California Energy Commission. Since 2005, California has mandated flat roofs on new commercial buildings be white. And a similar mandate is in the works for residential buildings.

I certainly don't want to get into a politics debate, nor do I want to open my mailbox to a flood of letters about global warming. But safe territory, I believe, is the opportunities the concrete industry will see in this "go white to go green" way of thinking.

Simply put, dark surfaces absorb more heat than light surfaces. Translation for the concrete industry: Asphalt surfaces absorb more heat than concrete surfaces, and this trapped heat contributes to the "heat island" effect.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): "The annual mean air temperature of a city with 1 million people or more can be 1.8-5.4°F warmer than its surroundings. In the evening, the difference can be as high as 22°F."