Clean cookstoves as covered by National Public Radio in the United States. NPR/February 9th, 2011 By Martin Kaste Almost half the world still cooks its food with solid fuels, such as wood and charcoal. The results are deforestation and black carbon, which contributes to global warming. And smoke-related disease kills an estimated 1.6 million people a year. In war zones, the daily hunt for firewood can present families with terrible dilemmas, says Veronique Barbelet of the World Food Programme. “You hear women in northern Uganda and places like that telling you, ‘My choice is between going out there and collecting Continue reading
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Lost Kittens, or, How Bollywood ate my traffic
Postcard from Digital Frontier I knew things had gone well for The Charcoal Project after attending the amazing PCIA conference in Lima last week. But I wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of traffic we began receiving early Monday morning. What was it? Was it my presentation on our visionary Biomass Energy Efficiency Project (BEEP) in Rubaare, Uganda? Was it our plan to organize an International Conference on Charcoal in Africa in 2012? Or maybe it was something more subtle… like the bar games and tricks I performed to a rapt audience at the chicken restaurant “Donde Walter.” Or, maybe, just Continue reading
Mega-million $ partnership to kickstart clean cookstove deployment in Nigeria
Hi, folks, we received the following communication from Simon Bishop of Shell Foundation: Good morning Shell Foundation is pleased to announce today a new cross-sector partnership that aims to tackle Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) at scale in Nigeria. The partnership between ourselves, Envirofit International (a global clean cookstoves business) and C-Quest Capital (a US-base carbon finance business) aims to deliver two million improved cook-stoves to Nigerian households over the next seven years. It will do this by using carbon credits to make cookstoves more affordable in Nigeria. Clean cookstoves are the most viable solution to IAP – the toxic smoke that Continue reading
Financing the clean cookstove revolution the green way
Financing the large-scale deployment of clean cookstoves A Q&A with Evan Haigler of Impact Carbon In late September 2010, several dozen men and women from around the world crammed into a small room at the United Nation’s Foundation’s headquarters in midtown New York to discuss how to deliver 100 million cookstoves by 2020 to the homes of the 3 billion people worldwide who lack access to clean safe energy. The challenge had been laid down a few days earlier by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she announced the creation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a $50 million Continue reading
Are plants, trees, and forests the new oil fields?
Concern about a land grab in Africa for the production of industrial-scale, ethanol-producing crops may well be justified, which is why bird-dogging the “African agricultural green-rush” is everyone’s responsibility.