No, Africa can't just stop cooking
How the clean cookstoves debate reduces first world climate extremism ad absurdum
It’s become nearly impossible to get Western donors to finance fossil fuel projects anywhere on earth.
It’s the kind of development that feels right, but only if you don’t actually think about it very much. If you do — like the good folks at WePlanet have done— you realize the taboo on aid-for-fossil-fuels engenders some straight-up absurdities.
Like the fact that campaigns that could save millions of life by helping Africans shift away from cooking with charcoal or wood to cooking with the stuff you use in your camping stove are suddenly impossible to finance, because first world institutions won’t finance any project that relies on Fossil Fuels, no matter the context.
None of the very well-meaning first world environmentalist intended to tell Africans, in effect, to Just Stop Cooking. But then, none of them stopped to think through the potential unintended consequences of a hard-line no-fossil-fuels-ever-no-matter-what approach.
Rich world climate activist don’t cook with charcoal in badly ventilated shanties. They haven’t seen a loved one die an easily preventable death because they didn’t have access to clean cooking fuels. Climate change is real to them in the way a slow death of emphesema in Uganda just isn’t. Their priorities reflect their lived experience. Of course they do.
So we end up with genuinely weird initiatives like Switzerland’s project to send super-hightech charcoal stoves to Ghana. The Swiss stoves are, granted, kind of cool — and definitely produce less indoor oil pollution than traditional stoves. But they’re worse than Liquified Petroleum Gas in just about every conceivable — they produce more pollution, lead to more deforestation and cost more to produce and to run than a plain old camping stove. And yet, Switzerland is still sending 180,000 of them to Ghana, because LPG stoves have that deadly “P” right in the name, and some climate group or another is sure to raise a raucus if any aid money is used to finance P infrastructure in Africa.
The result is a moral aberration. First world people who cook day in and day out on gas stoves will flip out if you suggest we help Africans do the same. We might as well tell them to Just Stop Cooking.
Here in California we had a grant-funded drive for small-scale (~1 MW) wood-burning gasifiers, which can produce liquid or gaseous biofuels. A 21st Century version of what Peter Bauer described as “appropriate technology,” at village scale. This technology is stupid for California, where our needs to remove biomass from the forests demands grid-scale facilities, especially since we have a grid. But it fits Africa like a glove.
Africa is a big winner in the adoption of carbon economics that recognize the carbon-sink values of forests restoration. Think Burundi. Those were magnificent forests that the Belgians hauled away. They may, with investment, be magnificent once again, and the whole world will benefit from the Forests Bank of Burundi.
The Forests Bank(s) support investments across the range of carbon-capture technologies. Quico Toro urges us to consider fertilizing the oceanic gyres so that they act like the famous one, the Saragossa Sea, as a large scale carbon sink. This is exactly the sort of project that a mature Bank will consider, as well as all manner of projects that, in addition to delivering global benefits, take good care of the people who restore and tend the forests that once were lost and now are found.
In Burundi and Burma (obsolete alliteration), in Brazil and Peru, in the ancient lands of the Maya and the Washoe.
Si se puede.
As soon as moralism made its way into finance, nonsense was bound to ensue.