For Three Dollars More

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50818

ENVIRONMENT: For Three Dollars More

By Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Mar 28, 2010 (IPS) - A high-level meeting in London of political and business leaders will consider this week ways of raising 100 billion dollars to fight climate change. And yet another one in Washington will search for ways of finding, and funding, more three-dollar stoves around the world.

The second one is more ambitious than it sounds; it aims to get more than half a billion clean stoves around the world. But working with the little and the tangible, it might just be more effective than the London meet. And, it brings simultaneous health benefits.

The Britain-based Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy is pushing strongly for cleaner stoves around the world. "Fighting climate change and improving the health of the world's poorest people are often seen as competing priorities," says a report from the Ashden Awards. "Yet some technologies address both tasks at the same time." For example, the cooking stove.

"Almost half the world's households, some three billion, eat food cooked on fires and stoves burning wood, dung, coal, straw, husks and charcoal," says the report released in London Sunday evening. "Pollution levels from smoke and gases such as carbon monoxide are typically hundreds of times those that would be tolerated in the streets or a factory.

"An estimated 1.6 million people die annually as a result, including around a million children under five, mostly victims of childhood pneumonia."

...

[Newest Reality]

1. I built my own rocket stove ...

out of assorted cans and they use less fuel and produce less smoke.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. I believe that's the sort of stove they're talking about (although a little more durable)

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2250

08 Mar 2010: Report

World’s Pall of Black Carbon Can Be Eased With New Stoves

Two billion people worldwide do their cooking on open fires, producing sooty pollution that shortens millions of lives and exacerbates global warming. If widely adopted, a new generation of inexpensive, durable cook stoves could go a long way toward alleviating this problem.

by jon r. luoma

With a single, concerted initiative, says Lakshman Guruswami, the world could save millions of people in poor nations from respiratory ailments and early death, while dealing a big blow to global warming — and all at a surprisingly small cost.

“If we could supply cheap, clean-burning cook stoves to the large portion of the world that burns biomass,” says Guruswami, a Sri Lankan-born professor of international law at the University of Colorado, “we could address a significant international public health problem, and at the same stroke cut a major source of warming.”

Sooty, indoor air pollution from open wood or other biomass fires has long been linked to health problems and deaths. More recently, scientists have been surprised to learn that black carbon — not only from biomass fires but from dirty diesel engines and other sources — is a far larger contributor to global warming than previously suspected: The dark particles absorb and retain heat close to the Earth’s surface that might otherwise be reflected.

...

Envirofit, a nonprofit started by two engineering graduates of Colorado State University and two professors, has developed a modified, patent-pending Rocket stove that it claims is exceptionally durable. A problem with past designs is that metal combustion chambers tend to quickly fail due to high heat and caustic fumes. But Envirofit worked with Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists to develop a combustion chamber made of metal alloys that give it an exceptionally long life — long enough, it says, that it can issue warranties on the chamber for five years.

...

[Statistical]

2. This is one thing that doesn't get mentioned often.

People in first world complain China (or India, or Africa) is building massive coal plants.

The reality is reliable electricity is such a huge improvements to quality and length of life the first world complaining isn't going to change anything.

Clean instant on heat is something we take for granted but frees up billions of hours of productivity.
Running water likewise improves sanitation and reduces hours spent gathering water.
Electric lights enable more work/studying to be done after dark without dangerous fossil fuels (kerosene).

The reality is for average Chinese peasant a coal power plant as awful and dirty as it is still beat current living conditions by a magnitude.

The first world (where we could cut energy consumption by half if we really wanted too) should be expected to take the lead. Me using 50% less power doesn't mean having to heat my home with dung, or cook over fire belching black smoke, or worrying about contaminated water, or not being sure I will not freeze this winter.

That is where the lead on conversation and clean energy needs to start. If cost of renewable energy keeps dropping China (and others) will adopt them but currently even 100% coal is preferable to living conditions many of them have.

[Nihil]

4. Two excellent points there ...

> The first world (where we could cut energy consumption by half
> if we really wanted to) should be expected to take the lead.

> That is where the lead on conversation and clean energy needs to start.
> If cost of renewable energy keeps dropping China (and others) will adopt
> them but currently even 100% coal is preferable to living conditions
> many of them have.

:thumbsup:

[joshcryer]

5. And that, my friends, is precisely the driver for anti-climate change remedies.

People are *afraid* that if they have more efficient technology that their standard of living would be dropped significantly. Just like some people are *afraid* that if a nuclear power plant is built it'll blow up and kill everyone around it. Or that nuclear power will result in a nuclear bomb being detonated.