On Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to announce a significant commitment to a group working to address the problem, with a goal of providing 100 million clean-burning stoves to villages in Africa, Asia and South America by 2020.
The United States is providing about $50 million in seed money over five years for the project, known as the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
X PRIZE, Govt. of India, and the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi) Announce Partnership to Create Global Competition to Develop Clean-Burning Cookstove.
Initiative would combat the serious problem of indoor air pollution, which kills more than one million people each year
It occurs to us that Mr. Bill Gates’ description above of how the market treats (or not) infectious diseases could easily apply to energy poverty and the 3 billion people who depend on biomass as their primary fuel. For one, the socio-economics of the victims are similar. Second, there is no natural market for clean cookstoves.
So, could a Gates-ian approach to combating infectious disease work for poverty alleviation? Maybe, but there are major, maybe irreconcilable differences, between the two.
Via Surfbirds News — Twenty-five years of environmental assistance in Madagascar by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has achieved major progress in the biologically spectacular nation, but the gains are at critical risk of being reversed – and will likely be lost all together – if the international community continues to punish its government for the ongoing political situation.
LONDON, July 21 (Reuters) – The Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism (CDM) may end from 2013 unless the world can agree and put into force a new round of carbon emissions targets before then, a U.N. paper has said.