The Low Hanging Fruit

One of the most persuasive arguments about cooking stoves being THE solution to Black Carbon that is said to contribute up to 18 per cent of the planet’s warming was by NYT’s Elisabeth Rosenthal.

Elisabeth made the simple point that “Replacing primitive cooking stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could provide a much-needed stopgap, while nations struggle with the more difficult task of enacting programs and developing technologies to curb carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.

In fact, reducing black carbon is one of a number of relatively quick and simple climate fixes using existing technologies - often called “low hanging fruit” - that scientists say should be plucked immediately to avert the worst projected consequences of global warming. “It is clear to any person who cares about climate change that this will have a huge impact on the global environment,” said Dr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who is working with the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi on a project to help poor families acquire new stoves. “

However, ‘Low Hanging Fruit” may be a bit of an over reach or an under-estimation. The government of India has since 1983 been promoting and funding programs for replacing ‘primitive stoves’ with smokeless chullahs. However, after 25 years of efforts by the state and the central government as also a wide cross section of non-profit bodies, technical institutes and even commercial manufacturers, it is clear that changing stoves is far from a ‘low hanging fruit’. On the contrary, it will take large size commitment, huge global effort and multiple formats of cook stoves at price points that are dead cheap for the majority of the residents of the planet who still cook on stoves from India to Peru to go smoke-less.

The not-so-humble stove

So what’s the big bet on Black Carbon given that it is indeed an immediate challenge for India. One of the points that probably get overlooked in the many informed discussions is that the impact of black carbon is in the proximity of emission and, therefore, of a localized nature. So, for India, it is not merely a question of how much it needs to be a per capita contributor to carbon footprints but, simply, what is it that is getting done in the eco sphere around the Himalayas that is impacting it?

Better stoves with lower emissions is clearly the way to go but the real benefit is from the other equally less visible, from a causative point of view is the health issue. As Penn Univ researcher Jeremy Carl had pointed out in his piece ‘Rising From the Ashes: India’s Black Carbon Opportunity’

“But India’s greatest black carbon reduction opportunity remains in cookstoves. Indeed it is the problem of indoor and local air pollution from cookstoves that has caused the Indian government and many private groups to initiate numerous campaigns over several decades to bring improved cookstoves to rural India. But generally speaking, these attempts have been unsuccessful for a variety of reasons.

First, cookstoves may break and villagers may lack the money, spare parts, or expertise to repair them.

Second, traditional cookstoves give a particular flavor to foods and many Indian women are

reluctant to trade these in even for more theoretically efficient stoves.

Third, with the exception of the work done by the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy, cookstove programs have almost always been done at a moderate scale. To achieve mass scale necessary for meaningful black carbon reduction (or large scale local health improvement), tens of millions of cookstoves will need to be put into the field and utilized. That takes scale, resources, and reach that can only be done with the active participation of the Indian state at the highest levels, ideally through a public-private partnership.