The Charcoal Project

Health

To achieve cookstove scale we need standards

Posted on by Jean Kim Chaix

What’s more important: reducing fuel consumption or reducing emissions of black carbon and other toxic gases?

The answer is, of course, both, but designing a stove that meets the highest current ratings in emissions reduction and energy consumption at a reasonable cost has so far proven elusive.

Coming up with the right standards will be critical to getting cookstove projects to scale, especially since carbon-credit financing will be vital for some projects to make financial sense, says Dean Still of the Aprovecho Research Center.

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REPORT: Indoor air kills 2.2 million young Chinese

Posted on by Jean Kim Chaix

BEIJING (AFP)  More than two million Chinese youths die each year from health problems related to indoor air pollution, with nearly half of them under five years of age, state media cited a government study as saying.

The study released by the China Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said indoor pollution levels can often be 5-10 times higher than those measured in the nation’s notoriously bad outdoor air, the China News Service said.

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WHO: Boosting improved cookstoves by 50% by 2015 would yield $105 billions/year for energy poor

Posted on by Jean Kim Chaix

Equipping 50 percent of  households that burn biomass with improved stoves by 2015 would cost about $2 billion upfront but would almost immediately yield $37 billion in fuel savings, leaving a net gain to the world’s energy poor of some $35 billion.

Over a ten year period this would generate an economic return of U$105 billion.

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In 2007, Indoor Air Pollution from inefficient biomass combustion cost Peru U$321,123,160

Posted on by Jean Kim Chaix

Peru could have bought every rural poor two energy efficient stoves in 2007 for the equivalent of what Indoor Air Pollution cost the country. That would be U$321,123,160 in 2007, in case you were wondering.

As we discussed last week, The Charcoal Project is leading a research on a global analysis that would put a price tag on the inefficient domestic combustion of biomass as practiced today in the vast majority of the developing world.

The figure mentioned above comes from the World Bank’s  Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) reports published on their website.

We randomly selected the 2007 assessment for Peru.

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Can Haiti be the new Katrina?

Posted on by Jean Kim Chaix

What will it take?

What will it take to tip the scale in favor of a global crash program to swap out three-stones-and-a-pot for energy-efficient stoves, kilns, and sustainable alternative biofuels?

Will Haiti be to bioenergy what Katrina was to climate change?

How long before Al Gore, Angelina, or Bono take on bionergy as the next big inconvenient truth? The Charcoal Project’s intelligence services tell us there is already a film in the works.  Will Bono embrace the rocket stove onstage to his fan’s delight?

Perhaps it will be the lure of a multi-billion dollar global market in carbon offsets from stoves, kilns, and briquettes programs that will do the trick. Or maybe it will be the on-the-ground realities of  implementing REDD that will undo the Gordian knot.

And the point is…?

Actually, there are four points and they boil down to this: Continue reading→