Make your roof a lighter color.

Make your parking lots a lighter color.

Or, if you’re a student, when you’re using your badass expensive prisma colors to color in you design for your studio critic ‘cause she told you to use colors this week, try coloring your parking lots and your roofs white. Think of all the ink you’ll save.

For everybody else, think of all the CO2 you’ll save. Read more:

Anyone who’s crossed a parking lot in August knows that blacktop soaks up a lot of heat. It turns out, rethinking the color of the surfaces around us could help cool the planet.

Roofs and pavements cover 60 percent of urban areas. Scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the California Energy Commission calculated that lightening their color worldwide could have the same effect on global warming as keeping 48.5 billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. That’s roughly the equivalent of taking every car in the world off the road for 18 years. This elegantly simple solution works because of increased albedo—the degree to which reflective surfaces bounce back the sun’s energy.

Closer to home, color-consciousness does more than fight climate change. Choosing roofing material that absorbs less heat can mean substantial energy savings and may qualify for utility-company rebates. Studies show a “cool roof” can cut air-conditioning bills by 20 percent or more. “It’s not only white roofs” says Michelle van Tijen of the Cool Roof Rating Council. The more than 1,400 products in the organization’s online database come in a range of colors, yet are engineered to reflect more heat than traditional shingles.

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