The quest for a stove that can save the world. Here is another one of those "I never thought of it": open fire cooking endangers our planet? Campfires and open fire cooking were my romantic experiences starting with the boy scout days. Well, and stayed so. OK, I’ve learned that as little as 10 percent of the heat goes to the cooking utensil, the rest is released to the environment, but who cares when camping by the mountain creek? That the house heating by wood and coal in the cities has to be replaced with something else was obvious to me also from boy scout days - smoke and fog, smelly fog for short, was so unpleasant in winter months. How about villages? They could stay romantic, I thought.
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Hearth surgery, an essay by Burkhard Bilger (in The best technology writing 2010, Yale University Press) opens my eyes some other way. He is tracking efforts to build a better and cheeper cook stove for the developing world, a technology more important than the iPod to vast regions of humanity. An excerpt from his text follows: "A map of the word’s poor is easy to make ... just follow the smoke. About half the world’s population cooks with gas, kerosine, or electricity, while the other half burns wood, coal, dung, or other solid fuels. To the first group, a kitchen is an arsenal of specialized appliances. To the second, it’s just a place to built a fire. As global temperature have risen, the smoke from Third World kitchens has been upgraded from a local to a universal threat. The average cooking fire produ- ces about as much carbon dioxide as a car, and a great deal more soot, or black carbon - a substance seven hundred times as warming. Black carbon absorbs sunlight. A single gram warms the atmos- phere as much as a fifteen-hundred-watt space heater running for a week. Given that cooking fires each release one to two thousand grams of soot in a year, and that three billion people rely on them, cleaning up those emissions may be the fastest, cheapest way to cool the planet." |
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