A Prius in Every Pot?

We have good reasons to believe the age of enlightened energy awaits us around the corner, right?

Not so fast.

It will be a long while before every thatched or corrugated tin roof on the globe has a photovoltaic array or a wind turbine. In the meantime, the plight of the energy poor – the 2.5 billion souls who depend on wood, charcoal, and animal dung for heating and cooking – will continue to deteriorate as they watch their environment, health, and prospects for emerging from poverty grow worse by the day.

They are predictably scattered across the globe, but the worse off live in Sub-Saharan Africa where about 90 percent of the population depends on traditional wood, charcoal, and animal dung (biomass in energy-speak) for their household fuel. The situation is serious. In Uganda, the government announced it will likely need to import wood fuel by the end of the decade. In barren Haiti, an average tropical thundershower can kill scores from mudslides and floods. In the Congo, the greatest threat to the endangered mountain gorillas are not marauding militias or poachers, it’s the women and children who are sent by the charcoal cartels into protected areas to cut trees for charcoal production.

Burning biomass indoors (including animal dung) using the traditional three-rocks-and-a-pot technology is directly tied to acute respiratory illnesses, the leading cause of death for children under five in developing countries. The World Health Organization estimates that each year, 1.3 million people – again, mostly women and children – in developing countries die as a result of fumes from indoor biomass stoves. It kills more people than does malaria, in case you were wondering.

Energy poverty is more than just a phrase. For these people, the day finishes much earlier than in richer countries for lack of proper lighting. They struggle to read by candle light. They lack refrigeration to keep food and medicines fresh. The few appliances they do own are powered by batteries, which eat up a large share of their incomes. What’s more, a recent report by the International Energy Agency estimates that 1.3 billion people will still lack access to electricity by 2030.

Meanwhile the consumption of woodfuel is set to increase between now and then. This means more environmental degradation, more CO2 released, more desertification, more loss of water resources, more floods and draughts, and more hardship all around.

One way to address this global energy imbalance on the scale it deserves is to launch a crash program to replace 4,000-year old technology with more energy-efficient stoves and clean-burning, sustainable biomass fuel, all of which can be made locally using available materials and discarded agricultural or vegetable material. Even briquettes made of corn husks mixed with mud will ignite faster and burn hotter, cleaner, and longer than wood and charcoal. MIT scientists have proven it’s possible to make these smart stoves and briquettes just about anywhere in the world using locally available resources. Unlike mosquito nets, unfortunately. And although no country has signed up to a national stove and fuel conversion program yet, the technology and market is being successfully tested in many countries around the globe.

In addition to curbing emissions, improving the environment, reducing mortality, and alleviating poverty by giving families more time to dedicate to education and work, a stoves and briquettes program can create vital jobs for the poorest of the poor. Expanding these types of simple technological solutions to other areas would spur a real green economy for the bottom of the pyramid.

What’s more, a crash program need not drain vital funding from development budgets. It could be financed using the same carbon offset mechanisms used to protect forests in the tropical belt. One major American bank has already floated this notion publicly and German utility is gearing up to sell carbon offsets from a stove efficiency program in Zambia.

In the end, Copenhagen will be a triumph of civilization only if we help everyone adapt to clean burning fuels and technology.

Kim Chaix