It’s amazing how much can happened in a few short weeks. I’m not talking about the fact that our website was hacked this week, or the royal wedding, or the events in Abbadabad, Bengazi, or Dara, we’re talking about developments specific to our field of interest. You wondering what these are? Where have you been!?
How about:
- The release this week of the IPCC report on Renewable Energy (RE) Sources and Climate Change Mitigation, in which it was revealed that:
“On a global basis, it is estimated that RE accounted for 12.9% of the total 492 Exajoules (EJ)5 of primary energy supply in 2008 (Box SPM.2) (Figure SPM.2). The largest RE contributor was biomass (10.2%), with the majority (roughly 60%) being traditional biomass used in cooking and heating applications in developing countries”
Already folks have begun to comment on why biomass should be included in this report since feedstocks are for the most part not being replaced in the developing world. What’s also important about this report is the prominence biomass plays in the global renewable energy balance compared to other RE sources.
This report will hopefully give a boost to our efforts to bring greater efficiency and sustainable practices to the use of solid biomass fuels in the developing world. This is one reason why next year’s International Conference on Charcoal will be so important.
- Or, how about this news item? A study by the very well respected Berkeley Air Monitoring Group has revealed that a mass produced improved cookstove from StoveTec:
“… demonstrated an improved stove can increase Black Carbon (BC) emissions relative to traditional stoves. The StoveTec had higher BC content in its PM emissions and higher overall BC emissions than the traditional stove, even though it reduced fuel consumption compared to the traditional stove.”
The implications from this study are significant because black carbon, sometimes called particulate matter, has been identified to be an important component of global warming. This means that potential reduction in the consumption of woodfuels may actually be cancelled out by the increased production of black carbon. This has major implications for all those clean cookstove projects that have banked on carbon finance and its explicit promise of Climate Change mitigation. The report concludes that,
While this result cannot be generalized to all improved stoves (or even to the StoveTec without further study), it demonstrates that improved stoves should not be assumed to reduce BC emissions.
So, to paraphrase former President Bill Clinton, “it depends what your definition of the word “clean” is (as in “clean cookstove.”)
- Another major news item that happened recently was the failure of negotiators to meet the May 1st deadline to begin serious negotiations that would make good on the promise to deliver 100 billion a year by 2020 to developing countries in their effort to adapt and mitigate Climate Change impacts and emissions. As some of you might be aware, there is a lot of talk of using some of this money to deliver universal energy access to the world’s energy poor.
We are concerned that the UN’s launch in 2012 of Global Campaign for Sustainable Energy for All may be off to a poor start if rich countries begin to hem and haw about their commitments made in Copenhagen and Cancun. Let’s hope for better luck in Durban.
- Oh, yes, there was that small item about Julia Roberts becoming the spokesperson of the clean cookstove campaign. It’s about time this issue got a pretty woman to stand up for it!
Now that our site has been liberated from the forces of evil, we’ll be following up on several of these stories.
It’s good to be back!
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