by Erik Wurster, Carbon Finance Manager
Last week I highlighted a series of media articles that focused on clean cooking technology in the developing world, asserting that many of them overlooked the critical linkage between clean cooking and carbon finance. Most notably, the New Yorker article entitled Hearth Surgery, would have greatly benefited from including this important point. I sent the following letter to the New Yorker’s editor in an attempt to underscore the subject, which they unfortunately chose not to publish:
Burhard Bilger’s article did great justice to the pioneering work of free thinking stove engineers whose designs form the foundation of the improved cook stove industry, yet the reader was left with little information about the financial mechanisms currently transforming how the world’s poor cook (Hearth Surgery, December 21st & 28th). E+Co’s clean energy work in the developing world has proven that the industry’s future, and its ability to deliver improved stoves to the 3 billion people for whom the technology means life or death, lies with carbon finance. With society and governments increasingly placing monetary value on clean air, companies such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and other leading investment banks are purchasing the carbon credits created by cleaner burning stoves. As a result, an inexpensive, well designed cook stove in Ghana or Mali yields more than twice its value in the form of carbon credits. The funds go to the stove manufacturers, enabling them to sell more widely and cheaply. What was once a razor thin margin industry that peddled homemade contraptions is becoming a high finance endeavor in which quality, life saving and green consumer products are sold at deep discount to the world’s poorest households, with polluters in the developed world footing the difference.
What concerns me most is not their unwillingness to publish my letter – they no doubt receive hundreds or thousands of such letters – but the assertions in the letter that they did publish:
There’s a proven alternative to a smoke-free cooker that burns wood (“Hearth Surgery,” by Burkhard Bilger, December 21st & 28th). After Parliament’s 1956 passage of Britain’s Clean Air Act, in response to the killer smog of December, 1952—in essence, the act said, “No more coal smoke”—deployment of smokeless solid fuels eliminated London’s smogs in less than a decade, with no change in stoves or fireplaces. Restoring Pennsylvania’s flooded anthracite mines might be difficult, but there are good ways to make smokeless solid fuels from the low-sulfur bituminous coal of Virginia, Wyoming, and many other places. Shipping such fuels as foreign aid to people living in developing countries, while costly, would help their breathing and slow the loss of their trees, which so usefully soak up carbon dioxide.
Arthur M. Squires
University Distinguished Professor (Emeritus)
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Blacksburg Va.
With this letter, they squandered an opportunity to add substantively to this important topic, and instead spread misinformation and counterproductive rhetoric that undermines the effort to address the needs of the world’s poor. While Professor Squires is correct that under certain circumstances, coal can be burned without harmful soot, the fuel emits huge amounts of greenhouse gases and is impossible to cost effectively deliver to those in need.
The author argues that coal would “…slow the loss of their trees, which so usefully soak up carbon dioxide.” Yet the amount of greenhouse gases per unit of heat in coal is about 25% that of wood, but many times higher on a per ton of fuel basis (not including the significant fuel needed to ship coal around the world). While coal is a non-renewable fossil fuel, when wood is consumed at a rate equal to regrowth, as in efficient stoves, it can be renewable. Although less CO2 would be emitted by coal on an absolute basis compared with wood, efficient biomass stoves can have a net zero impact on the climate.
Importantly, shipping coal in this case would not be economical. The notion of shipping coal by rail from Wyoming or Virginia to ships, across oceans to Africa, and then via rutted, unsealed roads to service rural homes with only a few coal briquettes each week is ludicrous. Not only will the energy consumed by shipping approach the energy content of the coal itself, but the cost of the fuel at point of delivery would be many times that of locally produced charcoal and felled wood, so price-sensitive consumers would not change behavior. Meanwhile delivering subsidized fuel in the form of foreign aid, as Professor Squires proposes, would fail to address the problem at scale. 3 billion people in need of fuel would swamp foreign aid’s limited capacity.
Replacing biomass fuels with coal among half the world’s population who rely on harmful and polluting cooking technologies would be a tragedy for humanity and for the environment. It is a great shame that the New Yorker chose this letter as a contrarian opinion to their earlier article.