by Erik Wurster, E+Co Carbon Finance Manager
Mainstream media, including the New Yorker magazine, NPR and Newsweek, have recently given significant airtime to the issue of efficient cooking technology, and not a moment too soon. About 3 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, cook in dangerous and polluting ways that cause enormous public health impacts and decimate forests. 1.6 million people die each year from indoor air pollution caused by obsolete cooking methods. In fact, more people die from indoor air pollution than from malaria and tuberculosis, two diseases that get far greater attention.
So I was thrilled to see respected media outlets such as the New Yorker covering this critically important topic. The New Yorker article chronicles engineers’ search for the perfect stove, one that is both high quality and low cost. It also highlights the outstanding public health research of Kirk Smith, a professor at UC Berkeley who has devised most of the empirical data to quantify this public health calamity. The New Yorker article can be viewed here.
The author of that article was interviewed in NPR’s Brian Lehrer Show, outlining what he learned during his several months researching this topic.
TreeHugger.com covered the New Yorker covering clean stoves, which I guess is better than not covering the subject at all.
But the only news outlet that really got it right was Newsweek, who featured our work in Ghana that uses carbon finance to subsidize stoves, so that even the poorest of the poor can afford them.
Admittedly, I’m biased, but the Newsweek article scratched the surface of a topic that is vital if we are ever to address this problem at scale. That is because carbon finance makes clean cooking profitable while slashing the cost to poor households. Of all the end user technologies that can change lives and livelihoods at the household level – solar PV, solar water heating or household biogas to name just a few – only efficient stoves can be made affordable to the world’s poorest people using carbon finance. Carbon revenues earned from an efficient stove’s use are nearly 2.5 times the stove’s value. The graph below tells the whole story.
So carbon finance is a game changer for clean cooking. Put simply, the fact that we can more than pay for this life-saving technology with carbon finance is going to change the way 3 billion people cook their daily meals. Given the profit involved in serving the bottom of the pyramid with improved cooking technology, this sea change will happen within years, not decades. Unfortunately, most of the coverage above missed this important point. Yet the reporting still made strides toward raising awareness about one of the world’s least discussed public health catastrophes.
I am an American living in Vietnam, and I am in full agreement with what Erik Wurster writes here. With the help of Alexis Belonio, I have been experimenting with various gasifier cook stove designs. The biggest problem I encounter is sourcing the right fans or blowers. If anyone would like to see these designs, I am happy to share them: http://www.esrla.com/pdf/gasifier.pdf
Letter to Mayor Sanders
From Art Cooley, Founding Trustee of Environmental Defense Fund
Dear Mayor Sanders and City Council Members:
San Diego’s economy is poised to benefit from the growth of businesses that are finding ways to create energy using non-carbon sources or by making present processes using carbon fuels more efficient. Many of these businesses are small and to go to scale need a boost. The boost comes from a cap and trade program which gives them an economic advantage over energy made with carbon based fuels. This not only lowers greenhouse gases but stimulates new industries.
A case in point is the effort to bring more efficient stoves to billions of people. Adopting these stoves will improve the health of the users by eliminating air pollution, reducing the amount of carbon put into the atmosphere and stimulating investment in even more stoves. At the moment production of these more efficient stoves is a marginal enterprise. With a boost from a cap and trade program, the widespread adoption of these stoves would transform the way the world cooks.
Erik Wurster in his blog at E+Co states, “About 3 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, cook in dangerous and polluting ways that cause enormous public health impacts and decimate forests. 1.6 million people die each year from indoor air pollution caused by obsolete cooking methods. In fact, more people die from indoor air pollution than from malaria and tuberculosis, two diseases that get far greater attention.”
And, it isn’t just about stoves. Stoves are but one aspect of the transformation that must take place in our energy sector. Economic incentives are the way to make this transformation. Our legislators need to be on the right side of history as we reinvent our energy economy from one based largely on carbon fuels to a more environment friendly non-carbon fuel economy. Senators especially need to understand this as they address global warming this Spring. If they do we will all benefit.
Warm regards,
Art Cooley,
Founding Trustee,
Environmental Defense Fund