| New articles about cookstoves seem to be appearing weekly. Here's one from Yale's E360 blog by Jon R. Louma that looks at how cookstoves represent an intersection of climate change and human health. The big picture: Some two billion people around the world, [Lakshman] Guruswami [professor of international law at the University of Colorado] notes, do most or all of their cooking and heating with fires from simple biomass - dried dung, wood, brush, or crop residues. In India alone, the ratio is much higher - about three-fourths. "Think about that," says Guruswami , who directs his university's Center for Energy and Environmental Security. "Two billion people, one-third of the people on Earth, are caught in a time warp, with no access to modern energy. They got energy from Prometheus a long time ago, and that was it." One of the emissions from these primitive stoves is something called "black carbon," which is a component of smoke that is almost completely made up of elemental carbon. The carbon is aligned into agglomerations of tiny particle in such a way that it has a deep black color (recall that glittering diamonds are also made up of carbon, but the atoms are organized in a significantly different way than the carbon atoms in black carbon). In recent years, black carbon has been receiving more and more attention from the climate change research community, with some estimating that black carbon is the second most important climate change agent after carbon dioxide (see, for example, a report from the Pew Center on Climate Change or one from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University , PDF). The piece looks at the effect of black carbon on the glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau (it reduces the reflectivity of the snow, leading to faster melting) and the work of non-governmental organizations like Envirofit (a stove-designing nonprofit); Trees, Water, and People (which focuses on Central America, Mexico, and Haiti); and Project Surya in India. Whereas much of the climate change discussion is about carbon dioxide and avoiding major calamity in the future, black carbon is a "now" and "here" issue: reductions in the emission of the pollutant would lead to immediate health benefits in the developing world (e.g., around cookstoves) and the industrialized world (diesel engines emit black carbon), while also helping to defuse the climate crisis, giving us a little time to get our carbon dioxide emissions under control. |
