OPINION I almost cut myself shaving this morning while listening to a BBC News story about The Hartwell Paper, which I’d only heard about en passant. The Hartwell Paper was drafted by a group of academics in an attempt to offer a radically different way of framing the issues raised by climate change, and hence a different set of approaches for tackling them. I’m writing about this now because, if the ideas put forward gain traction, they have the potential to place energy poverty and unsustainable biomass dependence where it belongs: out of the sustainable development wilderness and into the Continue reading
alternative energy
Germany investing in Uganda renewables, including biomass
One of the startling facts I refer to when discussing the dire biomass situation facing a number of Sub-Saharan countries is Uganda’s announcement last year that the country is set to run out of woodfuel by the end of the decade.
It looks like someone in Germany thinks Uganda’s situation is dire enough.
Take that Greece!
MDB: Civil Society Calls on World Bank to Reform its Energy Lending
By Matthew Berger / WASHINGTON, Apr 26, 2010 (IPS). Against the backdrop of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s spring meetings this weekend, numerous groups have chimed in on the need for and direction of a new World Bank energy strategy. (…) The new energy strategy will try to bridge the dangerous gap between increasing energy access and not exacerbating the effects of climate change. As such, energy likely represents one of the most contentious areas of the bank’s lending policy.
WHO: Boosting improved cookstoves by 50% by 2015 would yield $105 billions/year for energy poor
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.
Green tech, clean fuels for the rich and wood, charcoal, and animal dung for the poor.
Industrialized and emerging nations are poised to leap into the clean fuel and green technology future, leaving behind nearly a third of the world’s population who is destined to continue burning wood, charcoal, and animal dung using noxious technologies that have remained unevolved for the last 3000 years. What’s up with that?