Totally a privilege to participate in a symposium last week for KAUST and hear from Dr. Steven Chu, the Director of Lawrence Berkley National Lab who was just nominated to serve as the Energy Secretary in the Obama administration. 

Here is one amazing statistic Dr. Chu shared: If all of the roofs and paved areas in the tropic and subtropic regions of the world were retrofitted to be light colored, the amount of CO2 emissions saved would be about 44 billion tons, the equivalent to taking all of the cars currently in the world off the road for four years. WOW.

The last section of his talk was titled Reason for Hope. Part of the message, tying back into this statistic about the heat island effect, was that we can and must demand more from the environments we build. The choice of color for roofs or pavement is one simple example, but an elegant illustration it is of the way our design decisions collectively impact the world.