Green Wombat

If you’re a green geek, California is the place to be these days. Environmental technology is hot, hot, hot – just witness the megabucks being poured into Silicon Valley solar startups and biofuels companies. Sure, greentech is sexy – I for one am still waiting for that solar-powered iPod – but we tend to overlook low-tech solutions to environmental problems. Like painting roofs white.

So-called cool roofs reflect rather than absorb the sun’s rays and can lower air-conditioning bills by 15 percent and a building’s overall energy costs by half. That’s a considerable chunk of change given that we spend $40 billion a year on air conditioning in the United States. “If you have a new home in Sacramento or Fresno, on a hot afternoon there’s two ways to take a kilowatt off the grid,” Arthur Rosenfeld, a commissioner with the California Energy Commission, said recently. “One’s to install photovoltaics to cool the house – that’ll cost you about $7,000. Or you can make the roof white.”