[Stoves] interesting link

Sun Jun 24 23:56:01 CDT 2012

Dear Kevin

I have been tracking the evolution of the carbon trading for
stoves/development projects for a long time as you know. It is pretty much a
given in the corral of carbon cowboys that the writing is on the wall with
respect to the future of the carbon market.

>
.Unless you can get a "rock solid confirmation" that Carbon Credits will
be available for your possible stove systems, any stove project depending on
Carbon Credits for success is in danger of failure.

There is something that evolved in South Africa in the 80’s which was
‘corporate social responsibility programmes’. This means ‘giving back’ to
the community and all that. The idea was that a % of turnover or profit
would be devoted to social development and economic stimulation at the BOP
(Bottom of the Pyramid though the term had not yet been coined). It was
greeted with enthusiasm.

The evolution of the AGW scare from Global Warming into Climate Change into
Climate Disruption (we are all guilty of it 
 yatta yatta) is making a
transition from buying carbon offsets into a global form of corporate
responsibility (CSR) programme. Checking this out with one of the largest
carbon trading organisations, I received an immediate reply that ‘they were
aware of the problem’ and had already begun lining up corporate buyers of
‘offsets’ who were willing to swap to CSR programmes immediately. The gist
was ‘carry on, we have backing for you, and we will continue trading in
this’. Basically as fund-raisers, I guess. The fund is still deep, but it
will not be based on CO2 or GHG reduction, just ‘development’.

This has large implications for stove projects. How to market them?  How to
cover setup and development costs? Overhead for training producers? There
are already health implications which are ‘marketed’ as much as possible,
requiring ‘offsets’ of human health damage caused by the fuel or stoves. The
argument is often structured as follows: There people burn these fuels
because they are poor and ignorant. We should compensate them for their lot
by giving them a cleaner way to burn the fuels they have access to, while we
work on developing their wealth creation skills and education of their
children. When the children grow they won’t do such things because things
will be better by then.

The demonization of paraffin and coal are activities informed by this
argument: ‘people need to move up the energy ladder’ and get away from dirty
fuels’. That is not to say anything about the fossil fuel angle, it has to
do with perceptions of the ‘dirtiness’ of the fuel, often promoted by people
selling ‘clean fuels’.

There is a certain merit in parts of the health argument or any aspect of
sensible upliftment of deprived or dysfunctional communities: the
elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty, or energy poverty, for
example. So the evolution I am expecting is that the carbon thing will fall
away for several reasons and the ‘need for donations’ will continue so we
need viable and reliable mechanisms.

It will be interesting if after this evolution there is a net increase in
donorship. The idea of directly assisting projects that uplift communities
is catching on at all levels. The in-between people will develop the market,
so to speak, out of a need for self-preservation, but the companies will
start handling more direct funding when they become more comfortable doing
so and the trading commissions and profits from speculation in futures will
wane.

The emergence of the Social Capital Market (SoCap) is an interesting
parallel development that funds projects with a triple bottom line. I
participated in one of the SoCap events in San Francisco as a guest of UNDP,
making a presentation on 25 years as owner of a SoCap company. There was
about $7 billion on the table for sustainable projects – stoves or anything
else that could be shown to deliver simultaneously on the environmental,
social and economic front. That is the triple ‘profit’ they want to see.

The two initiatives may eventually find common ground in the form of
‘sustainable development with a triple bottom line’. Something to watch for
is the evolution of the term ‘sustainable’ away from negative CO2 emissions
to the more middle of the road ‘green’ concept of doing no harm and
providing long term benefit. ‘harm’ does not only mean to the green
environment but to the social fabric and local economy.

It is clear from just the past few posts here that there are significant
negative consequences to fanaticism and this applies to all forms of it.
There is an interesting book on fundamentalism called “Asking Questions”.
The author Bahiyyih Nakhjavani defines fundamentalism as “
any thought which
plods blindfold around the treadmill of its own unquestioning assumptions.”
It involves moral coercion and intimidation and is replete with appeals to
authority.  That is the perfect characterisation of many energy things but
we can leave that discussion for another time.

The big question is what will happen to stove project funding in the
immediate and near future (to 2020, for example).

The emerging trend is to support projects that deliver benefit to the
dispossessed, marginalized, oppressed, deprived and in any way poor.
Impoverishment has many faces. Fuel purchasing from a shrinking resource is
a powerful argument in favour of improved stoves. Indoor air quality is
obviously a no-brainer. It has to be interesting to observe that in
Ulaanbaatar, with the most polluted air of any capital city, the air inside
the low income homes where the stoves are is much better than the outdoor
air where the chimneys vent. They used to have open fires indoors, not
everyone, literally, has a chimney. The only problem left is swapping the
stoves for cleaner burning ones, which is in process right now (more than ½
done).

The stove community above all needs two things more than money: better
products (most of them are immature) and better ways of telling us how they
perform in absolute and relative terms.  Where a subsidy is involved, it is
more likely in future to be attached to product development and proofs of
concept that based on long term ‘emissions trading’. In the latter case you
sit back and extract revenue from the continued sale of a fuel-saving stove
which is a pretty hard sell, morally, to the SoCap market, even if they
engage in trading carbon certificates. It is likely the transition to SoCap
funding will be fastest in the voluntary carbon market because they are the
ones doing it ‘voluntarily’ rather than by legislation or fiat. Their hearts
are already in the right place; they just need a new and more sustainable
mechanism. A more efficient delivery of results per $ would be nice. 

Regards

Crispin 

Strive “
to refute what is vain and false, to establish the truth
”

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20120625/9112eb10/attachment.html>