Replacing Cook Stoves in 3rd world with clean ones fail bigtime
Kyoto-Financed Cook Stoves Fail as Health/Climate “Intervention”
Well you remember the much hyped program to provide free cleaner burning cook stoves in 3rd world countries because people were making smoke inside and harming the environment and the health. Indoor air quality would improve and carbon would go down if we just spent money proving free cook stoves.
Well studies show no improvement. Why. People took the stoves and kept the old ones. Now they have 2 stoves inside they use the new one and they like the way the old one made bread so they stack them like in the photo.
Researchers from Canada, the United States, and India measured the indoor air quality impacts of providing modern “clean cook stoves” to families in southern India. The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) subsidizes the distribution of such devices.
The researchers examined indoor air pollution concentrations and fuel use in 187 households in a village in Karnataka, India. About half the households received “clean” stoves, and half–the control group–did not.
The climate benefit of the CDM-financed “intervention” was also nil. As Phys.Org reports:
Moreover, the “clean” cook stoves actually “increased the proportion” of household emissions composed of black carbon, a strong warming agent that darkens and melts Arctic ice.
Weirdly, whether households used the new stoves or traditional stoves, indoor air pollution concentrations increased during the course of the study: “Across all households, average indoor concentrations of particulate matter, an unhealthy component of cooking smoke that can contribute to lung and heart disease, increased after the intervention stoves were introduced—likely because of seasonal weather patterns or food rituals that required more cooking.”
Here’s the most shocking thing, which Phys.Org does not report. It is well known that CDM-subsidized cook stoves do not reduce household concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) to safe levels, especially in households that lack “chimney ventilation.”
More advanced stoves that use modern fuel (liquid or gas) rather than wood emit far less PM2.5 and black carbon. However, though such stoves are “ideal” for achieving “ambitious health and environmental goals,” the CDM program does not support those technologies “because they use fossil fuels, which are not considered renewable.”
Kyoto-Financed Cook Stoves Fail as Health/Climate “Intervention”
