[Stoves] Fwd: Women's empowerment

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at outlook.com
Sat Oct 7 00:21:08 CDT 2017


Dear Ron and All TLUD char-bury-iers

I think you have to get a grip on the scale of what is possible in the short term, and what is impossible.

I am working on reducing the amount of coal consumed by some 400m people in Eurasia. Using off the shaft technology locally manufactured, it is pretty easy to reduce the consumption of coal, and of course CO2. It will not require any carbon finance at all. This reduction can be compared with burying char for 'carbon negativity'. Reducing emissions is no different from burying char in terms of the 'carbon budget' which the most recent paper examining it says is twice what it was thought to be. That reduces the problem by half before we even start to calculate.

So, how many cooking stoves producing 400 g of subsidised char per day would be the equivalent of a coal consumption reduction being achieved already? Can you guess?

More than 6,000,000,000. So...that is not going to happen because there aren't that many kitchens in the world.

CDM carbon finance is only available for reducing the use of unsustainably ‎harvested biomass. Suppose half of it is unsustainably harvested. Taking as much or more will increase the harvest in many cases because that old Three Stone baseline is rapidly disappearing. ‎ You are competing against improved stoves, not three stones.

If you try to sell the 'improved fertility' argument, you are competing against CO2 fertilization which has increased all biomass production globally by about 11% since 1980. Someone can correct that number if they like. It might be more.

Why should we pay to improve soil fertility with stove char if a greater system-wide effect can be achieved for free?

I think you need a macro-plan what has no subsidies in it.

With 243m people in China burning coal at home, we are better off saving them $12 each per year than trying to pay the rural population of Nepal to bury their charcoal. To Nepalis it is fuel for those stoves that pregnant women sit on to keep warm. Saving rural Chinese RMB10bn per year in fuel purchases is a better option.

I realise Goldman Sachs will be disappointed because there won't be any commissions.
Crispin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20171007/544507f3/attachment.html>


More information about the Stoves mailing list