What wildly underfunded climate solution can achieve all of these goals simultaneously:

• Slow global warming by increasing the reflectivity of the Earth (geo-engineering)
• Reduce local temperatures in the hottest cities (adaptation)
• Reduce fossil CO2 emissions (mitigation)
• Save U.S. consumers and businesses billions of dollars in energy costs
• DReduce urban smog and hence cardio-pulmonary disease
• Create more than 100,000 jobs in two years?

The answer is a major effort to make roofs (and pavements) whiter and/or more reflective, which should be coupled with a major urban tree-planting effort. This “urban heat island mitigation” (UHIM) may well be the single most cost-effective energy and climate strategy.

[This figure is from EPA's excellent heat island website, showing how urban areas are relatively hotter where vegetation has been removed and replaced with dark, heat-absorbing roofs and pavements.]

UHIM will be the subject of a multipart series. Part 2 will look at a new analysis of the multi-trillion-dollar direct climatic/geo-engineering benefits of a global “cool roofs” initiative [and, no, I am still not a fan of what is commonly called geo-engineering, see here]

Part 3 will present a specific new proposal to use the economic stimulus package to jump-start the UHIM effort. A key benefit of a UHIM stimulus is that it does not require either highly-skilled labor or expensive, uncommon material. Thus, unlike many proposed elements of the stimulus package (green or otherwise), this one can be ramped up quickly.

The rest of this post is an introduction to heat islands, excerpted from a Technology Review article I coauthored, “Paint the Town White–and Green“:

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The NYT and AP report:

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico confirmed in a statement released Sunday afternoon that he has withdrawn his name as the commerce secretary nominee, citing a pending “investigation of a company that has done business with New Mexico state government.”

Mr. Richardson says in the statement that he and his administration “have acted properly in all matters,” but that the “ongoing investigation also would have forced an untenable delay in the confirmation process.”

That is really too bad, because Richardson was a big supporter of clean energy and climate action — and that is quite rare for a Commerce Secretary (see “The first green Secretary of Commerce“). I hope PEBO picks someone else who understands that the future of American commerce is cleantech.

On the very first day of 2009, the L. A. Times ran a story that already seems a lock to win the year’s dumbest headline award. And dumbest subhead: “Recent moves by lame-duck officials, though frustrating to environmentalists, offer the president-elect time and political cover to deliberately craft rules on emissions, energy lobbyists say.”

Yes, the LAT thinks that accelerating new coal plant construction, greenhouse gas emissions, and the wanton destruction of the planet’s livability will give Obama “breathing room to fight global warming.”

You might just as well argue that waterboarding gives its victims “breathing room” — after all, right after you have been the waterboarded you breath like you have never breathed before, desperately gasping for air.

And that’s what 8 years of Bush have left us (see “Climate Progress Person(s) of the Year“). We are, as the Hadley Center explained last month, desperately fighting to save the planet from “catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100, but now with much less time, much higher global emissions, and a lost decade of inefficient, polluting infrastructure built at a cost of many trillions of dollars — and now on top of that we have a bunch of a last-minute destructive regulations:

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