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October 22, 2024
There are many tools and solutions available to help offset the global rise in temperature caused by greenhouse gas emissions. One such method that has been gaining traction in recent years is the use of solar reflective materials in the built environment. The degree of solar reflectance (or “albedo”) of our roofs, walls, and pavements, can impact local temperatures as well as the Earth’s energy balance. High albedo surfaces help to reduce the urban heat island effect, and a new report shines light on their effectiveness as a climate change mitigation measure. In this episode, EESI Board Member Kurt Shickman joins co-hosts Dan and Alison for a conversation with Seth Jacobson, Climate Solutions Officer at the nonprofit Climate Resolve. Seth leads the Shine On initiative, which was launched in 2023 to study the impact of albedo management of the built environment on climate change.
Show notes:
Podcast: 6.5 Hot Today, Hotter Tomorrow: Policy Solutions to the Dangers of Extreme Heat
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Episode Transcript:
Daniel Bresette: Hello and welcome to The Climate Conversation. I'm Dan Bresette, president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
Alison Davis: And I'm his co-host, Alison Davis.
Dan: We are thrilled to be back this week to explore a really fascinating climate solution: solar reflectance in the built environment. The scientific term for the degree of the solar reflectance of a surface is “albedo,” A-L-B-E-D-O. To give you an idea, Earth's average albedo is about 30% reflectance, while fresh snow reflects 90%. Fresh asphalt—that really dark, black, fresh asphalt—is a very low-albedo surface reflecting only about 5% of the sun's energy. If you think about how much asphalt we have in our cities, it makes sense that low-albedo pavements and building surfaces would contribute, or could contribute, to urban heat.
Alison: By designing our urban infrastructure with reflective surfaces, not only does it reduce the urban heat island effect, but it also offsets the warming effect of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. So albedo management contributes to both adaptation and mitigation. This might sound familiar to some of our listeners because it was mentioned in a previous episode with EESI Board Member Kurt Schickman. A lot of research has been done on the mitigation potential of solar reflectance since that episode came out, so Kurt agreed to come back on The Climate Conversation for a deep dive today.
Dan: Kurt is the founder of KS Advisory, a consulting practice that specializes in urban heat resilience, as well as a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. Previously, Kurt was the director of extreme heat initiatives at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht–Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, and in 2011 he launched the Global Cool Cities Alliance, which has grown into a global network of over 70 cities. Today, Kurt's here to discuss his work as a consultant for the nonprofit Climate Resolve and its cool surfaces community called the Sol Collaborative. Last year, Climate Resolve launched the Shine On initiative to study the impact of albedo management of the built environment on climate change. Kurt was the editor and a contributing author of a recently published white paper, titled, “Shine On: Increasing Local Solar Reflectance as a Means to Reduce the Greenhouse Gas Effect.” Kurt, it's always awesome to see you. Thank you for joining us today. It's great to have you back.
Kurt Shickman: Oh, it's awesome to be here. Thanks for having me.
Alison: Kurt, I'm really glad you're here to help us unpack some of the science behind albedo management, because unlike so many of my EESI colleagues, I personally do not have a science background. So as I was reading the Shine On paper, I felt like the local benefits for heat reduction were simple enough for me to understand, but the mitigation aspect gets a little bit more complicated. So that part's important, because Shine On is primarily focused on reducing the Earth's energy imbalance to combat global warming. So to start us off, could you explain what the Earth's energy balance is, and what we can do to change it?
Kurt: Sure, Alison, and I have to say that I am the beneficiary of a lot of very patient scientists and experts to get me to where I am. So I'm by no means a scientist myself, but have really benefited from their knowledge, and again, their patience in explaining things many times to me. So the energy balance of the Earth is essentially a budget. We receive energy from the sun, and if that's more than what we release out into space, then we have an imbalance that creates warming on the earth. If we release more of that energy than we receive, then we have a cooling effect. For the last many, many, many years, we have had an imbalance going in the former direction, which is to say that we are receiving more solar energy than we are able to release out into space, and therefore we have a condition of global warming. Now this is a very complicated process. There are many different aspects to it, but I think for the purposes of this conversation, there are three key processes that we should consider here. So the first is we receive shortwave radiation from the sun—that's sunlight, for normal people talking about it—and that sunlight can have one or two things happen to it once it enters the Earth's system. We can reflect it as shortwave radiation, or the sunlight, either in the atmosphere or on the surface. And because shortwave radiation is pretty transparent to the atmosphere, almost all of that will pass out of a clear sky and into space, and that produces some of that release that we need to balance the Earth's energy budget. The other thing that can happen, though, is when that, when that energy hits a surface on the earth, let's say, and it isn't reflected, it's absorbed, that creates a need for the Earth's surface to actually release that energy in some way, and it does that through generating or emitting thermal infrared energy, or long wave radiation, or colloquially, we call it heat. And now that is not transparent to the atmosphere. So what we find is that when we are re-radiating that thermal energy, much of it is getting caught in the atmosphere because of the greenhouse gas effect, and then that's being re-emitted back to the Earth and some out to space. But in general, those are the two key pieces here around the Earth's energy balance, and we have done a tremendous amount of work to understand the mitigation side of that. So if we reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, we know that that has some benefit to that energy balance, and we've built an entire finance system around that. We've done a little less on the other side, which is that other sort of albedo modification piece, and that was what the work of Shine On has been trying to do, to do a much more thorough job of explaining that equivalence. We know that equivalence exists in science, but localizing it and making it useful for actual practical purposes is, I think, the next stage of this and why I'm excited to be part of it.
Dan: Thanks for that explanation. Kurt, let's get into it. And to do that, let's bring in our guest, Seth. Jacobson. Kurt, you were nice enough to introduce us to Seth, he is Climate Resolve’s Climate Solutions Officer, and he's the Program Director of Shine On and in all of this work, he develops and implements innovative climate solutions in collaboration with disadvantaged communities and other key program partners. Seth has degrees from Harvard in astronomy and astrophysics, and also a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Public Policy from UCLA. Seth, Welcome to The Climate Conversation, and I'll share a quick anecdote. I was at Climate Week, and I was at a reception that will go unnamed, and two people behind me were talking about Climate Resolve and Shine On and I was like, Oh, cool. I'm gonna get to meet Seth in a couple weeks. That sounds really exciting.
Seth Jacobson: Thanks so much, and thanks for having me
Dan: True story, too.
Kurt: So Seth, I'm really glad that you could be here for this. And I have to say, I've had the great fortune over the years to work with Climate Resolve as a partner, to work with you directly on Shine On and others. And I continue to be amazed at how you guys have operated and delivered on heat resilience in the world's sixth largest economy. And a lot of that comes down to the type of DNA that you guys put into the Shine On initiative, which is science-based, but applicable to the world and mindful of the communities in which that science will be applied. And so I guess I'd just love to hear you talk a little bit more about what Climate Resolve does and how it does it, and then maybe a little bit about the Shine On initiative, which is the sort of latest iteration of that work.
Seth: Thanks so much, Kurt. It's been great working with you, too, and as you know, our Executive Director, Jonathan Parfrey founded Climate Resolve 15 years ago. We're a Los Angeles-based NGO, and our offices are in the LA Cleantech Incubator. Jonathan, prior to founding Climate Resolve, was a commissioner at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and prior to that, he was a local director of Physicians for Social Responsibility. And even though he's not a doctor, he comes at the climate-related work from a community and public health point of view. So 15 years ago, when he launched Climate Resolve, his focus was on local climate change solutions. And as you know, 15 years ago, that was really innovative. Folks were talking about polar bears and global impact, and not what we can do at a local level to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. And so from the very beginning, Jonathan started working with scientists, and as you say, we're a very science-based organization, working with researchers from the very beginning at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, NASA JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory], UCLA and USC, to take their peer-reviewed research on cool surfaces and at that time, it was mostly cool roofs. And translate that research for local policymakers. And in that way, Climate Resolve led the way to create the first-in-the-nation cool roof mandate in the city of Los Angeles, and then from there, we expanded that cool roof mandate to Los Angeles County, and then ultimately got cool roofs included in the state's building code. And from that work, at least in the city of Los Angeles, we have with the city, been able to account for over 70,000 cool roofs that have been installed in the City of LA since that mandate went into place. So every time somebody significantly repairs their roof or installs a new roof, it needs to be a cool roof. And after establishing that policy, we then went to work on implementing projects. So we started partnering up with other NGOs like Habitat for Humanity and GRID Alternatives, which you may know provides no-cost PV solar for income qualified homeowners, and we started doing cool roof and PV projects together. We've done dozens of those with our partners in Los Angeles County. And then after implementing those projects, we started to expand into doing cool walls projects, mostly murals with local artists, as well as cool pavement projects. And most recently, we worked with the City of LA and a local community based organization called Pacoima Beautiful and a private sector partner called GAF, which you may know is North America's largest roofing manufacturer. They also do both cool roofs and cool pavement, to implement 18 blocks of cool pavement in the Pacoima neighborhood in Los Angeles. And then we worked with a researcher named Dr. Haider Taha, who had established California's Urban Heat Island Index and partnered up with grad students from UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, as well as Pacoima Beautiful to gather research data—pre- and post- putting in those cool pavements—and Haider recently published his study in a peer reviewed journal documenting significant cooling benefits for the community, reducing air temperature by three and a half degrees Fahrenheit during an extreme heat event, and reducing Land Surface Temperature by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And so those are the three legs of our work in the sense of policy projects and research, and we also do education outreach and advocacy. But with those three pieces, we decided to pull those together into a new initiative called Shine On. And we received about a million dollars in philanthropic funding from the ClimateWorks Foundation’s Clean Cooling Collaborative and the Grantham Foundation, and with that, we are elevating through Shine On the two-for-one benefits that, Kurt, you started to speak to, both the local urban heat island mitigation benefits as well as the global cooling benefits of reflecting more sunlight back into space. And by elevating those two-for-one benefits with cool surfaces, we are aiming to attract more public and private sector funding to these projects, particularly in under-resourced communities that can't afford to fund these projects themselves.
Kurt: That's super helpful. Seth, I appreciate that background, and I think I can clearly see the path here to Shine On. Maybe we could dig in a little bit on that, and Alison's comments up front, the local benefits of albedo modification—cool roofs, cool walls, cool roads, those sorts of things—are pretty well understood. But what you're really getting into now is these additional benefits that we get, no matter where we put these assets. And I'm curious. I talked about that in my introduction around that both these mechanisms are part of global energy balance. But I'm curious what science tells us about how that practically gets applied. And so if you take a project that's doing albedo change and compare it to one that's doing greenhouse gas emissions reductions, and how do we do that in reality? Or is that appropriate to do?
Seth: Yes, we can, as you were describing the energy imbalance in simple terms, is that about 340 watts per meter squared of sunlight is entering our atmosphere, and only 339 watts per meter squared or thereabouts is being radiated back into space. And that one watt plus or minus per meter squared over the surface of the Earth is more than 500 trillion watts of energy added at any one time, which is heating things up. And so both as you were describing, greenhouse gas emissions and surface albedo changes, can impact the amount of energy radiated back into space. And we can create an equivalency, or science creates an equivalency in the form of radiative forcing, which is watts per meter squared, as we've been talking about, and another term that we use, which is global warming potential, and that is just a ratio typically used when we're talking about greenhouse gasses and comparing the radiative forcing of certain greenhouse gasses to carbon dioxide and so again, when we're talking about radiative forcing, or watts per meter squared that's either reflected back into space or kept within our atmosphere, because albedo changes also contribute to radiative forcing, we can swap out another greenhouse gas and replace it with albedo when we're doing an analysis of global warming potential. And so in that sense, we can create an equivalency. Of course, there are differences that have to do with both radiative forcing and other climate related impacts of greenhouse gas emissions. So it's not an apples to apples comparison entirely, but with respect to radiative forcing specifically, there are differences in impact with respect to time horizons that require a closer look. In other words, how do you compare a road project with a lifetime of, like 40 years to CO2 that will be in the atmosphere a lot longer? And typically, global warming potential calculations tend to use 100 years for everything. And so our technical working group within Shine On, including experts from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, are diving into those questions with respect to time horizons and equivalencies.
Kurt: That's really helpful. And I think you're pointing out a really important distinction here, which is that science can tell us a lot, but if it's not speaking to the politicians, the policy makers and the people that finance and invest in it, that's a challenge. And thank you for sharing a little bit of some of those specific challenges that you're addressing through the technical working group. I wonder if there are any others that you're thinking about or working on that will require additional technical support to address over the coming months and years.
Seth: Yeah. So, you know, again, time horizon is a key question, and fluctuations in albedo throughout the time horizon due to weathering of a roof or use of a road as well as maintenance. And so we're getting into not simplification, but instead creating a more complex understanding of those dynamics. There are other local variables, like aerosols in the sky, from, say, diesel emissions or humidity or urban canyons from tall buildings and road traffic and cloud cover that, again, need to be factored in over time. And then the other thing that we're finding, and that I know you understand, is that different cool surface products reflect differently across different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, so different cool pavement or cool roof products may be more suited for different use cases. In other words, one cool pavement product could be well suited for a road in the southwest of the US, but a different product may be better suited for, say, a Walmart parking lot in the Midwest, and understanding these differences is key for investment and policy making. And so, for example, you know Dr. Randy Kirchain’s team at MIT, and they have mapped the potential impact of increasing the albedo of roads throughout the country. And interestingly, even though our focus until recently, has been much more on urban heat islands and cities, they found that the radiative forcing benefits from increasing albedo in rural areas is significant because those rural areas don't have as much of the aerosols, certainly not the urban canyons and vehicle traffic that can hinder that reflectivity, and that, again, will be really important for policy making. And again, our technical working group is diving into this assessment, to develop a more comprehensive model to account for these factors and to be able also to measure and verify the benefits to attract more public and private investment.
Dan: So to deploy these solutions at scale, some amount of public investment will be necessary, but my guess is that there's just no way we could ever have enough public investment. So what's the state of the thinking around how one values or puts value on these projects, in a way, to refer to something Kurt said a little bit earlier, to attract people with financing or with access to capital into these projects, to deploy them increasingly at scale, which is probably where we we need to be headed.
Seth: 100%, and you know, we again are focused on attracting more public funding. But as you say, there are limits to that, and it can be very unpredictable, both federally and even at the state level. In California, even though we have a very climate focused administration, we also have budget issues. And so really focusing more on public-private partnerships and also directly attracting more funding from market based mechanisms is essential. And so I just say that immediately green bonds can be used to invest in cool surface projects, and we know that they are starting to be used and approved under use of proceeds for green bonds. We just need to get the word out and encourage that more among those who are using green bonds, both cities and the private sector. In addition, the private sector is starting to develop ways to engage voluntary credit trading markets, using CO2-E for carbon markets, voluntary carbon markets, or simply a cooling credit just straight up, using watts per meter squared to attract more capital to projects, and so that's something that our technical working group is working on in close collaboration with our finance working group within Shine On, because we need to do a better job of being able to estimate, measure and verify the amount of energy that's being reflected into space if we are going to secure more private sector funding.
Dan: So I'm thinking about this now from like the Earth, the planet, the system, backing up, floating in space, looking down. If we do these sorts of things, we'll be changing the reflectivity of the surface of the planet, their natural surfaces, their artificial surfaces, but still the planet. What would you say to people who might be listening to this saying, like, Hey, that sounds like engineering the surface of Earth. That sounds like geoengineering. Is what we're talking about geoengineering. Is it like geoengineering? Is it separate? Is it distinct, but from like that high, high level you know, floating out in space, if you start getting more of those watts per meter square back being reflected away from the surface, what's the difference between what we're talking about here and what other people might have in mind as as geo engineering?
Seth: This is not geo engineering. Geo engineering consists of large scale, atmospheric or space based interventions, people spraying things into the sky, such as stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening, as well as new fangled space based technologies. It also includes ideas to modify the albedo of large surface areas, like water bodies, or even some ideas around big agricultural areas. Climate Resolve does not support geo engineering. What we're talking about are small scale changes to albedo management in our built environment, including roads, parking lots, rooftops, and walls, which total less than 1% of the Earth's surface. So when we fix a road or fix a roof, we should simply put in cool pavement or a cool roof. How I try to explain this to folks is that, first of all, civilization has slathered our built environment in asphaltic materials, low-albedo pavement and roofing tiles, and they absorb the sun's energy and re-emit it as heat. And so simply replacing them with cool surface products that are now available can reflect three times as much energy back to space. It's just, in my view, common sense. The other way I try to explain it to folks is that you may not have heard of cool surfaces, but in the next five to 10 years, they will be as common as dual paned windows, for example, because they just make sense from an energy efficiency point of view, we're just learning about their global cooling application as well.
Dan: And you mentioned codes before. I mean, double pane windows, triple pane windows are great, but like, the reason why those are common places, because that's how we build our buildings, right? We don't think about them. That's just, that's code. Have to do it. So eventually, you know, having cool roofs or other surfaces makes a lot of sense here.
Seth: I was just going to say there are groups like the New Buildings Institute that are doing great work on codes and standards for cool surfaces. Also the Cool Roof Rating Council, which Kurt is a part of, is doing a lot of work to just help inform the process and educate folks around standards that could be applied for codes and standards. There are a lot of folks who are doing that work. It's very heavy lifting, and to the extent that the federal government can help support those efforts, it would help move things along.
Dan: So speaking of the federal government, you talked a little bit about California being a relatively supportive policy environment for this type of work. That's great. But at the federal level, are there things the federal government, the federal agencies, could do? Are there things Congress could do to help advance this work, or otherwise, is there stuff the agency should not be doing, or Congress should not be doing that good, you know, maybe unintentionally hinder some of the efforts that might be happening in leading states like California,
Seth: Taking a step back for a second, cool surfaces sit within the Venn diagram overlap between adaptation and mitigation, and we currently have ways to value and quantify the benefits of the adaptation piece, whether it's energy efficiency or public health benefits, but we're not currently capturing the value of the climate change mitigation benefits, and so Shine On aims to do both, and at the federal level, we need to include the global cooling benefits in our cost benefit analysis. There is broad consensus on the science of radiative forcing, but in the peer-reviewed research by some very smart folks, there's still around an order of magnitude of difference for calculating those benefits. Very smart people disagree. So the science is settled, but the math is not. And our technical working group, again, with experts from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, are leading the way on trying to build consensus around the math through their analysis. So in addition to Drs. Ronnen Levinson and Pouya Vahmani from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, we have Dr. Frank Klink leading the working group. And Frank was the director of 3M’s lab that developed many of the cool surface materials, and he was leading that lab for 15 years. And so they're working together with experts from the private sector, the public sector, and nonprofits, to conduct their analysis, and in that sense, as I mentioned, they're seeking to build consensus around the math, determining at a very specific level what coefficients should reasonably be used with each of the variables that I was mentioning before that impacts radiative forcing due to changes in surface albedo, and then building the model to enable stakeholders to accurately estimate the radiative forcing for any project in the world. And then, in addition, we're also assessing tools for measurement and verification to recommend which technologies we should use to cost effectively measure and verify watts per meter squared reflected back to space. And we need the federal government's help to unlock that, and we will be asking for that help from NOAA, from the Department of Energy, which supports a lot of this work, from the Department of Transportation, from FEMA and other agencies that we started to engage with and will be engaging with more in the year ahead.
Alison: So there's an impressive amount of research that is covered in the Shine On initiatives recent paper, but I know that there are some remaining research gaps in albedo management, and the report does list out some of these, but I'm curious, which ones do you think have the biggest bang for buck?
Seth: Well, it's interesting, because, on the one hand, we need more support for both basic material science research and applied research. Cool roofs are a little bit more mature. Cool pavement is in more of the early innings, and on the back end, we need more support to measure and verify the benefits and impacts in real world settings. It's interesting. At Climate Week, I met with the CEO of one of the big cool pavement companies, and he told us that the version one point over their product was actually developed based on a request by a defense contractor that the cool payment company was originally in the asphalt business and supplied asphalt to that contractor, and apparently one of our adversaries has a satellite system that's good at seeing in the infrared, and the contractor was concerned that the heat of the blacktop tarmac would make it easy to see signatures of things sitting on the tarmac, so they asked for a cool pavement coating that would reduce the infrared to obscure things. And as we know, we and our allies have military bases in some of the hottest places in the world. So my point is, there's also room for DOD and DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] to invest in research on cool materials for defense purposes, to enable the development of new products that can serve a dual purpose in the civilian world, and ultimately, overall, extreme heat should be supported in terms of research on par with more traditional climate resilience programs like wildfire, drought and coastal resilience, and that's something that we hope the federal government will start to do.
Alison: Absolutely, so my next question is a version of a question that EESI likes to ask about any climate policy or climate solution that we look at, and that is, how do we ensure the equitable deployment and implementation of albedo management policies?
Seth: Yeah, thanks for asking that. So the federal Justice40 guidelines are a good place to start. In California, we like to think that we go farther. We also use and have a tool called CalEnviroScreen that was developed by the state government and other mapping tools to identify under-resourced communities that are most at risk of climate impacts. And right now, the state is also developing a CalHeatScore tool to identify the most vulnerable and heat burdened communities. And I think to the extent that the federal government can kind of pick that up and help disseminate that and apply it to other parts of the country, that would be super helpful.
Kurt: Well, Seth, this has been really, really helpful. And I guess I want to reflect on something you said, and I'm going to say not as well as you said it, but that some of this work is really about unlocking more of the existing benefits and recognizing those benefits of things we need to do anyway, because we care about people and their livelihoods and about the safety and resilience of our infrastructure. So with that in mind, I wonder if you could paint a picture based on projects that Climate Resolve has done, or in communities that you're working in, to help us understand what does a project look like on the ground that's actually delivering these types of benefits that would benefit even further once we unlock this puzzle of the sort of global energy balance.
Seth: You know, as I mentioned, we recently implemented a project in the Pacoima neighborhood of Los Angeles. This is a neighborhood that's very under resourced, very little tree canopy, very little mechanical cooling in homes and businesses. So the 18 blocks of cool pavement had an immediate cooling impact. And interestingly, within Hyder's research, he also showed that it had a cooling benefit downwind of the neighborhood that received it, so there were positive externalities for communities around the neighborhood that received it. And importantly, one of the things we're trying to do at Shine On and from our experience at Climate Resolve, is we've seen that most of the time these community cooling projects are looked at as one offs. There's some planning to get a grant. They implement it, maybe there's some assessment, maybe not. And then they just kind of move on. And within our albedo projects working group, we're developing more of a continual improvement approach to this work, in a cycle that starts with that planning, then we help them get that funding, help them implement it, and then do assessment with recommendations for additional improvements, because nobody gets it right the first time. And in the case of our Pacoima project, we started with 10 blocks, and there was a control neighborhood next door that didn't get the cool pavement. And once they saw the benefit to their neighbors on those 10 blocks, they said, wait, why are we not getting this? So we expanded it to the 18 blocks to include their streets. And now we're in the process of also providing no-cost cool roofs and PV solar. And so it is a bit of an iterative process there, and we would just encourage that we are now within the albedo projects working group also establishing a research advisory committee of six leading researchers and six local community based organizations that have experience with cool surfaces, and together, we're encouraging them to collaborate to develop best practices around research frameworks, both that we can use for assessment and again, continual improvement, and also that we can share out with our colleagues who are doing this work nationally, so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel. And obviously these frameworks will be iterative, and we'll learn from doing, but we're starting there.
Dan: This has been a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for joining us on our podcast. I have a prediction to make that we will have to continue covering extreme and excessive heat in our congressional education resources, unfortunately for the foreseeable future, and so Alison and I will definitely be interested in tracking your work and Shine On’s work and all of the great work that you and Kurt and others in this community are doing to deliver cooling solutions. So wish you the best and keep on shining on.
Seth: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Kurt: Thanks, appreciate you including us.
Dan: Well, Alison, whenever we have Kurt on the podcast, I feel like it shoots right to the top of my favorite episodes. He is working on such cool stuff and pun intended, and his network is so interesting, and his willingness to introduce Seth to us, and, we've had a chance to learn about Shine On and Climate Resolve, and this has been really cool. I think we talked a little bit about this, like it came up a lot, the idea that this is a two for one, right, adaptation and mitigation benefits. You know, sometimes we call those double whammies. If you're doing them for one reason, there's another reason to do it sitting right there. And I think this one in particular is such a great example of something that, you know, building just things a little bit differently, even if there's a small cost increment, but just doing things a little bit differently with cool roofs and cool walls and different surfaces, given how much there is out there to, over time, cycle through and replace just seems to me like such an obvious thing for us to do, as we either, you know, take care of our existing infrastructure and renew it, or build out new infrastructure. Adding new infrastructure that contributes to these problems doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And I think the work that Seth is doing and the Shine On initiative, helps people think a little bit differently about the costs and benefits of the old way versus the better way. Really exciting to think about how much benefit, multiple benefits, you know, we could get from these kinds of improvements in our built infrastructure.
Alison: Yeah, it's been almost exactly a year since we last had Kurt on the podcast. And when we talked to him before, his description of solar reflectance in that extreme heat episode really stood out to me as something that sounded just so interesting and something that I wanted to explore for some sort of future content. And I'm glad it ended up being another podcast episode. I was really excited to hear about how this local scale mitigation effort can have global benefits, which is really going to be the selling point to have it more considered in public policy, but also, just like that local benefit, the heat reduction benefit, is so important, and we've said it on this podcast before, and we'll say it again, but extreme heat is the number one killer out of all the climate-related disasters in the U.S. So you know, it may be starting to feel cooler outside, but extreme heat is something that we really need to be working on all year round. If you want to learn more about EESI, work on buildings or extreme heat, head to our website at eesi.org and follow us on social media @eesionline for all of our recent updates. The Climate Conversation is published as a supplement to our bi-weekly newsletter Climate Change Solutions, go to eesi.org/sign up to subscribe. Thanks for joining us and see you next time.
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