taken from Green, a NYT blog about energy and the environment By Elisabeth Rosenthal New York – Oct. 4th, 2010 — The United Nations Millennium Development Goals were adopted in 2000 as a commitment to improve health and education as well as end poverty in less fortunate parts of the globe. The eight goals include targets like universal childhood education, reducing infant mortality and ensuring environmental sustainability. This year there has been a growing movement to add a ninth goal: ending energy poverty. Some 1.4 billion people lack access to electricity. Energy experts like Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the Continue reading
Health
Clean-Burning Cookstoves for Developing Countries
Source: The New York Times, published Sept 28, 2010 To the Editor: Re “Developing Nations to Get Clean-Burning Cookstoves” (news article, Sept. 21): It is great news that the United States will provide $50 million to help provide clean-burning cookstoves for villages in Asia, Africa and South America. In addition to the appalling health risks (1.9 million deaths a year due to inhaling smoke from open fires) and the environmental devastation caused by cutting down trees for fuel, women and girls risk rape and sexual violence when they gather wood to cook or sell. This is particularly true in refugee camps Continue reading
Struggle to agree UN summit kickstart for Millennium goals
By Tim Witcher (AFP) – 1 day ago UNITED NATIONS — World powers are moving slowly toward an accord on the strategy to be embraced at a looming United Nations summit aiming to get the lofty Millennium Development Goals back on track. Ten years after more than 150 leaders set eight ambitious targets for 2015 — ranging from cutting child mortality rates by two thirds, to halving the number of people living in absolute poverty and spreading access to the Internet — none are likely to be reached, experts say. Fallout from the financial crisis, a lack of will and Continue reading
Can the Gates-ian approach to treating infectious disease work to alleviate energy poverty?
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.
Energy efficiency: what Coca Cola’s World Cup video can teach us
While we wait for Coca Cola to help us produce the perfect video that tells the story of energy-efficiency-technology-and-policies-solutions-to-energy-poverty, (they can help us find a better name, too!) we’ve compiled four slideshows recently published in the New York Times that we think help visualize the energy hunger/energy obesity world we live in.