Cook Stoves and Climate Change

Several months ago, I reported on the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer, a czarina post created by President Obama on April 6, 2009, to represent the interests of third world female population.

Verveer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that we had to “build a global market for clean cook stoves” because they affect the climate through “greenhouse gases and short-lived particles such as black carbon. In her opinion, by integrating females into the supply chain of clean cook stoves, new economic development opportunities would be created for third world women, thus bringing gender to climate change.

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which was launched on September 21, 2010 in Washington, D.C., had 240 partners and many founders:

-          German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development

-          Government of Norway

-          Government of Peru

-          Morgan Stanley

-          Shell Foundation

-          the Netherlands

-          U.S. Agency for International Development

-          U.S. Department of Energy

-          U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

-          National Institutes of Health

-          Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

-          U.S. Department of State

-          Environmental Protection Agency

-          United Nations Foundation

The United States was in the platinum donor category with $5 million dollars, the Department of Energy, EPA,  the Department of State were in the gold donor category with $1-5 million each, along with socialist European nations such as economically troubled Spain and Ireland, the World Bank, and many UN affiliates.

The Department of Energy awarded “Clean Biomass Cookstove Technologies” grants of $100,000 and $750,000 at a time when our country could ill-afford it, unemployment was at an all time high, taxpayers were unhappy, and the administration was demanding that we reduce our consumption of energy.

According to Washington Post, the U.S. has pledged $105 million in the last two years toward the project and Hollywood provided a spokesperson, Julia Roberts. Replacing cook stoves with “clean cook stoves” with chimneys would help 100 million households by 2020.

The “science” provided under the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves consisted of two articles, one published in Le Monde by Bertrand d’Armagnac on November 13, 2011 and another published in Bloomberg by Jonathan Alter on November 24, 2011. Both pieces cross-referenced World Health Organization data that 2 million people die annually from smoke inhalation, more than malaria, TB, and AIDS combined. Fuel, wood, dung, makeshift charcoal, and agricultural waste, were directly responsible for 2 million deaths, particularly in women and children who inhaled the smoke during cooking.

Third world dictatorships were incapable of running their countries, feeding, sheltering, and caring for their people properly yet kept such accurate count of disease and death rate data caused by cook stoves.

The recent results from two studies demonstrate that cook stoves do not improve the users’ health, do not reduce pollution in the environment, do not reduce the amount of wood burned, and “occasionally release a larger volume of certain pollutants than the traditional stoves they were intended to replace.” Brian Palmer said in the Washington Post, “From a wider environmental perspective, clean stoves didn’t slow deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions either.”

RESPIRE (Randomized Exposure Study of Pollution Indoors and Respiratory Effects), a large-scale study, showed improved air quality and health but not by as much as suggested in observational studies. (Washington Post)

Rema Hanna of Harvard University and Esther Duflo and Michael Greenstone of MIT released the results of a much larger study, “Up in Smoke.” They sold clean cook stoves to 2,600 households in 44 Indian villages for 75 cents each. The actual cost of the stoves was $12.50. Made of mud with two burners and a chimney, the stoves were not always used correctly, or maintained by the users. The “clean cook stoves” delivered the same amount of measured pollution as the previous stoves although people were trained how to use them.

“Lung functioning, incidence of respiratory illnesses, the body mass index of children in the household and infant health outcomes such as birth weight and infant mortality did not change significantly.” (Brian Palmer, Washington Post, April 17, 2012)

Brian Palmer admits in his Washington Post column that, “Just because a solution works in a laboratory – or among a small group of closely watched test subjects – doesn’t mean it should be rolled out to 100 million households.”

Michael Greenstone of MIT said, “This isn’t an argument against spending money; it’s an argument against spending money unwisely.” Yet The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is forging ahead with studies in Ghana, Nepal, and Kenya in spite of failures so far.

I am not disputing the fact that people have died throughout history from unsanitary and unhealthy living conditions. We have waged education wars to improve living conditions and spent trillions of dollars to alleviate poverty around the world yet we do not seem to be any closer today than we were in the beginning. Repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome is a pattern of absolute liberal madness.