A not particularly modest proposal: Pave roads with lighter colors to save the world.

You might already know that reflective rooftops are better for the environment. They reduce the urban heat island effect, help keep buildings cool, and therefore lower energy use. But on a recent trip, flying into Burbank Airport, I got to wondering: Why don’t we make roads lighter-colored, too? They must take up a huge amount of area, totaled together, I figured, and all that blacktop has to be terrible for heat islands and climate change.

The math turned out to be just a wee bit harder than I expected. A few calls to the Federal Highway Administration and elsewhere revealed that no one is exactly sure how much area is paved with roads in the United States — they know the length but not the width. And no one is exactly sure what it’s all paved with, which makes calculating albedo — that’s total surface reflectivity — difficult.

But in the end I found a researcher who’d already done some of this hard thinking. So was I right about saving the planet with silver-white streets? No spoilers; click play.