Faded

The first book of the Christian new testament puts into the mouth of Jesus of Nazareth the metaphor of a "whited sepulchre". A sepulchre is a tomb. In Jewish culture, a tomb was something "unclean" that should not be touched by right-living people. To prevent this direct contact, tombs were "whited" (whitewashed with lime) annually, after which the gleaming white of the limewash would belie the corruption within

The author of the gospel has Jesus using the whited sepulchre as a metaphor for the venal and depraved behaviour of the contemporary Jewish religious authorities, which he declares they concealed behind outward displays of excessive piety and devotion. In short, they were hypocrites

All this was brought to the front of my mind by the story that someone in US has developed a super-reflective white paint, which has the effect of keeping buildings that are painted with it a lot cooler on sunny days. Someone else in US has calculated that if we use enough of the stuff, we could reflect enough of the sun's energy back into space to counteract the damage we have done to the atmosphere

There are plenty of reasons why this is pseudo-scentific pie in the sky. It is just the latest example of our longing for a techno fix for the climate crisis - a magic carpet that will carry us out of the corner we have painted ourselves into. We want to keep up our high-carbon lifestyles and escape the consequences of the damage we are doing by hiding ourselves in whited houses. It will not wash