The Dark Roof Lobby Is Coming For Your Cool Roof!

In 1986, I purchased a home in northwest Rhode Island that had been built in the 1920s as a summer fishing camp. The only insulation it had was some rolled up newspapers — in French! — under the window sills. There was none in the walls and none in the roof. My heating bills the first winter were stratospheric. The house was originally one story but somewhere in its lifetime, two shed dormers has been added to allow for thee small bedrooms on the second floor. The roof was made of black asphalt shingles, the kind that were common throughout New England for generations.

That black roof helped warm the upstairs in winter but made it unbearably hot in the summer. I replaced the black shingles with silver shingles after fall arrived and slept comfortably upstairs for years thereafter. Adding insulation between the rafters helped a lot as well. But if I tried that today, I might run afoul of the dark roof lobby, a group of manufacturers reps who are pressuring state officials and local building officials to roll back “cool roof” mandates in laws and building codes.

Why would anybody do that? The answer is, they get paid to make their case and if they are not successful, their payments cease. We can’t have a bunch of building materials lobbyists thrown out of work, now can we? The argument they stake their livelihood on is one MAGAlomaniacs are known for — freedom of choice. People should be free to choose a dark roof if they want to. It’s the American Way!

Regular readers have heard this argument in many forms from other industries. Policies promoting electric vehicles must be opposed because people should have a right to spew toxic emissions into the air if they want to. Similarly, people should be free to choose appliances that waste energy if they want, so let’s get rid of the Energy Star program while we’re at it.  Choice is thrown around with wild abandon by the MAGA crowd. People should be free to poison their families with pollution from their gas stoves and furnaces if they want to.

We even see this in the tech world where Elon Musk thinks it is perfectly okay to make other drivers part of his self driving obsession. He should be free to do that but others should be prevented from opting not to participate in his beta testing protocols. Freedom is many things to many people but it often comes down to nothing more than being able to shove your beliefs down someone else’s throat.

The Dark Secret Behind The Dark Roof Lobby

In this case, the controversy is between two manufacturing groups. On one side are companies that manufacture EPDM, a black synthetic rubber roofing material that has long dominated the commercial roofing industry. But EPDM is losing market share to TPO, a plastic single ply material that comes in many lighter colors, including white. Leading EPDM manufacturers include Johns Manville, Carlisle SynTec, and Elevate, a division of the Swiss multinational company Holcim. Those companies also make reflective roofing materials  but oppose regulations that might diminish their dark roof market share through lobbying groups such as the EPDM Roofing Association.

That group, whose executive director is Ellen Thorp, recently achieved a victory in Tennessee, which had a “cool roof” mandate in certain counties. But as the average temperatures in the State have increased, that mandate expanded to cover major cities like Memphis and Nashville. So the EPDMRA swing into action to find a few Repuginican state representatives who were willing to drink the “freedom of choice” Kool Aid. The Tennessee legislature has now repealed the “cool roof” law.

The fight has also played out on the local and national stage. The groups was successful at keeping Denver from adopting a “cool roof” standard, but more important than that, it has managed to block the adoption of stricter standards by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), a professional organization that creates model standards for city and state regulations.

The Guardian, in a story co-published with Floodlight, reports the current ASHRAE standard recommends reflective roofs on commercial buildings in US climate zones 1, 2, and 3, which are the hottest regions in the US. They include most of the south, Hawaii, almost all of Texas, areas along the Mexican border and most of California. In a recent statement, Ellen Thorp crowed, “We’ve been able to stop all of those … mandates from creeping into climate zone 4 and 5.”

The primary tool used by the lobbying groups is to attack the science that says “cool roofs” can save on cooling costs for buildings and partially mitigate the “heat island” effect those buildings have on urban areas. The heat island concept claims cities get so hot during the day that they cannot cool down sufficiently overnight, which means they start each new day hotter than they could be if “cool roof” techniques were widely adopted. Studies show on sunny day roof temperatures on a dark roof can be as much as 50 degrees F hotter than on a lighter roof.

Higher Emissions From Cooling

But there is more to it than that. All that heat leads to higher indoor temperatures, which means air conditioning equipment has to work harder to keep interior spaces cool. In 2010, a study by Berkeley Lab using data from NASA estimated that using “cool roof ” techniques on the roofs of all cities in the northern hemisphere could have a one-time effect of removing more than 24 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but let’s not do that if it means someone will lose market share!

“If all eligible urban flat roofs in the tropics and temperate regions were gradually converted to white (and sloped roofs to cool colors), they would offset the heating effect of the emission of roughly 24 gigatons of CO2, but one-time only,” said Art Rosenfeld, a physicist at Berkeley Lab. “However, if we assume that roofs have a service life of 20 years, we can think of an equivalent annual rate of 1.2 Gt per year. That offsets the emissions of roughly 300 million cars for 20 years!” 300 million cars is about how many cars there are in the whole world. Do we have your attention yet?

Here we can clearly see how the profit motive skews human behavior, and not for the best. In the pursuit of profits, the best interests of society are sublimated to the motives of multi-national corporations, even though the benefits to society could be enormous. If we do not craft a way of assigning an economic value to a sustainable world, the epitaph for humanity will be one word long. “GREED” is all it will say.

Hat tip to Dan Allard.