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Jean Kim Chaix

Kim Chaix is the Founding Director of The Charcoal Project and is also Director of Strategic Impact for Rainforest Foundation USA.

Can The Hartwell Paper bring biomass & energy efficiency out of the development wilderness?

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 […]

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A Man, a Stove, a Mission

Nathaniel Mulcahy’s speaks with the urgency and precision of someone on a mission and with little time.

Although he has patiently and politely dedicated the better part of an hour to our conversation, I know that the moment he hangs up he will be off to complete a million tasks on his to-do list.

Mulcahy has good reasons to be in a hurry. The first one is that he cheated death seven years ago following a really bad accident, so he’s a man on his second chance.

The second reason, which is linked to the first, is that he is determined to bring energy-efficient cookstoves to the world’s 2.4 billion people who sit at the bottom of the world’s energy ladder. They are the poorest of the poor who lack access to modern fuels and must make do with wood, charcoal, and animal dung to meet their everyday energy needs.

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NYT: United Nations: $35 to $40 billion global plan to expand energy use and reduce carbon

UNITED NATIONs – At least $35 billion to $40 billion of annual investments will be required to link all people in the world with modern forms of energy by 2030, a goal that must be reached while reducing heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions, a U.N. advisory group recommended yesterday.

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UN report Energy for a Sustainable Future is pie in the sky

OPINION – Do the energy poor, especially those who depend on biomass for their primary fuel have to wait until electricity magically arrives in their home before they can get rid of their three-rocks-and-pot that is killing their children, mother, and wives?

This question was actually bravely posed at the UN last week in a closed door Q&A session held after the release of a report called Energy for a Sustainable Future.

The response given was, literally,”nothing.” Nothing is being done for the energy poor until electricity arrives.

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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.

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Encouraging partnership on sustainable biomass for Latin America

Addressing today the newly minted Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a series of promising initiatives. Not surprisingly, the one that really grabbed our attention was the following: Advancing Sustainable Biomass Energy: The U.S. Department of State and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are inviting interested countries

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