The Charcoal Project

A lesson in Coca Cola's World Cup video.

Does anyone know someone at Coca Cola?

We sure could use their deft marketing expertise as displayed in the video above made by the corporate giant for the World Cup! (Click on the image to play the video.)

Granted, selling the beautiful game loved by billions is easier than promoting energy efficiency technology and policies for the base of the pyramid.

Still, making a video that mists the eyes of the most hardened anti-soccer mysanthrope is no small feat.

While we wait for Coca Cola to helps us produce the perfect video that will help the energy-efficiency-technology-and-policies-solutions community tell its story (we can start by giving it a real name!) , we’ve compiled four slideshows recently published in the New York Times that we think help visualize the energy hunger/energy obesity world we live in.

Two of these four slideshows appear in Andy Revkin’s weekly roundup of green news on the NYT’s website.

Finding Design Solutions for the forgotten ones

William Kamkwamba attended the MIT sessions

The first piece is a slideshow narrated by the Time’s Andy Revkin reporting on the great work being done by Amy Smith at MIT’s D-Lab. We are thrilled to see that her annual sustainable design workshop has this year brought together folks from around the world to think about simple design solutions to many of the challenges faced by those living at the base of the pyramid.

This is a good opportunity to note that Smith was an early booster of our work here at The Charcoal Project.

No, really. These photos are worth more 1000 words!

Tibetan glaciers' vanishing act

The second piece is a more sobering slideshow about the dramatic recession of Asia’s Tibetan glaciers. The images are taken from a current photo exhibition at New York-based Asia Society. The idea of documenting receding Tibetan glaciers by matching photographic images taken from the same vantage point is not new. In fact, one of our scientists at The Nature Conservancy did this back 2005 using photographs taken in the first half of the XXth century.

Read New York Times columnist Nick Kristoff’s take on the images.

Add concrete, mix, and voila!

The third slideshow is titled China’s Instant Cities and the images speak for themselves.

Pizza delivery for Apt. 1,288,757 - A? (Photo: Christoph Gielen)

Quoting from the story intro: This year China will add more than 17 million people to its urban population. To house this unprecedented wave of migration from the country side, cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou are building countless high-rise residential towers at breakneck speed.

Climate Change? What Climate Change?

Finally, the last slideshow is a collection of images documenting the record-breaking heatwave that is baking many parts of the world, including our hometown, New York City.

We hope this selection of New York Times slideshow will help people who have the power to effect change to connect the dots because the time to take action is now!

Kim & Nina

What will it take?

What will it take to tip the scale in favor of a global crash program to swap out three-stones-and-a-pot for energy-efficient stoves, kilns, and sustainable alternative biofuels?

Port-au-Prince

Will Haiti be to bioenergy what Katrina was to climate change?

New Orleans

How long before Al Gore, Angelina, or Bono take on bionergy as the next big inconvenient truth? The Charcoal Project’s intelligence services tell us there is already a film in the works.  Will Bono embrace the rocket stove onstage to his fan’s delight?

Perhaps it will be the lure of a multi-billion dollar global market in carbon offsets from stoves, kilns, and briquettes programs that will do the trick. Or maybe it will be the on-the-ground realities of  implementing REDD that will undo the Gordian knot.

And the point is…?

Actually, there are four points and they boil down to this:

1. Is there a need for a global stove, kilns, biomass program?

2. Is the bionergy/biomass community ready to step up to the global challenge or will it cling to its small-scale, silo-ed, buckshot approach?

3. Is the world, especially the development community, ready to recognize and embrace the issue with the same furious passion it has correctly championed clean water, HIV/AIDS, climate change, malaria, and the eradication of polio, to name a few?

Getting the message across in Lagos

4. What will it take to move the world’s needle in the direction of a global effort to swap out three stones and a pot for better stoves, kilns, and fuels?

So?

Here’s what I think.

I response to the first question, my gut tells me there is a need but I’m not a scientist or development expert. I realize that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach in the way condoms, sex ed, and retrovirals come to mind when combating HIV/AIDS. Or the the mosquito net for malaria. This is perhaps the most difficult question to answer.

However, if the answer to the above is in the affirmative, then I am confident that practitioners and champions of bioenergy/biomass technology can rally around a unified goal. Whether you care about indoor air pollution, climate change, environmental degradation, or poverty alleviation, low-cost technological fixes and clean, sustainable biomass fuels exists to solve these overlapping global challenges. We might differ on how to get there exactly but I’m certain the likes of Hedon, PCIA, Aprovecho, Canada, Uganda, Brazil, Haiti, USAID, EPA, DOE, World Bank, UNEP, WHO, WFP, Berkeley U, MIT, and so many other organizations in so many countries can find enough common ground to rally around a shared vision. We have a choir, now all we need a hymn sheet, to answer question 2.

My answer to number 3 is an unequivocal yes. We know what the problems are and we have the technology to fix them. All this at a very low cost compared to, say, the financing of clean coal development or even a single nuclear power plant. When I explain the magnitude of the problem, its impact on half the world’s population, and the existence of readily available solutions, people I speak with invariably get excited about solving this problem. I’m certain you all get the same response wherever you are.  In the words of Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a leading climate change scientist at the University of California San Diego, solving the charcoal/woodfuel problem is the “low hanging fruit” for climate change…. and, I would add, environmental degradation… and indoor air pollution… and energy poverty.

So what will it take? Three things: marketing/communications, lobbying, and resources. Launching global marketing and advocacy campaigns is not rocket stove science:

Nike ad in spanish

Marocco

"Yes. One dozen rocket stoves, please."

Nike, Coca Cola, IBM have managed global campaigns. As Tuyeni Mwampamba mentioned in our interview last month, there’s a real disconnect when the poorest of the poor can afford to have a cell phone (Nokia? Sony?) yet still use inefficient stoves and biomass. Maybe a free cell phone with every stove?

Perhaps Haiti will help us get the ball rolling. Either way, let this be a call to all in the bioenergy field to start thinking global, not just local.

I know not everyone will agree with our views on this but let the discussion begin and let’s hammer out a consensus because the stakes are high and the time to act is now.

Kim & Nina

The Charcoal Project

Amy Smith/MIT

Speaking at TED a few years ago, Amy Smith, the MIT professor and McArthur Genius Award recipient, made a compelling case for the widespread introduction of simple technologies that could solve major environmental, public health, and poverty problems in developing countries. Her bio on the TED page sums it up best: Invent cheap, low-tech devices that use local resources, so communities can reproduce her efforts and ultimately help themselves. Smith hatches her ideas at D-Lab, the MIT unit responsible for coming up with some of the coolest technological fixes for two thirds of the world’s population.

If her ideas are so beautiful in their simplicity and so relatively inexpensive to deploy, why haven’t they gained traction in the global development agenda? Perhaps it’s scaleability. Fragmented markets. Or penniless consumers.

With the notable exception of mosquito nets and a few clean water pumps, it seems that simple technological fixes that actually save lives do not figure prominently in development assistance budgets. This is odd considering the significant positive impact that, say, fuel efficient stoves and clean burning briquettes can have on poverty alleviation, public health, and environmental degradation.

Our challenge is to turn critical technological innovations into large-scale campaigns that will rival no-brainer solutions like mosquito-nets-to-combat malaria or the rope pump. Because, really, how hard can it be to improve on three stones, and a pot?  Perhaps what’s lacking are the numbers to justify the cost-benefit analysis. We’ll also need some good marketing and communications. Welcome unemployed social marketers! Welcome statisticians, modelers, researchers! Welcome venture philanthropists. Your time has come!

Amy Smith’s ideas deserve more attention and support.

Kim

Charcoal.

You may not think much about it. But if you care about public health, poverty alleviation, and the environment, then it’s a big deal.

Why? Because more than two billion people use wood, charcoal, dung or agricultural resides as primary fuel for their cooking and heating needs, leading to significant health, economic and environmental consequences.

Consider these stats presented by MIT’s Amy Smith:

• Almost 2 million deaths each year are caused by breathing smoke from indoor cooking fires [1]

• Respiratory infections are the leading cause of death of young children worldwide.[2]

• An estimated 50 billion hours are spent collecting firewood each year. That’s as if the entire workforce of the State of California worked full time for a year doing nothing but fetching water! (Not sure exactly how they’d fetch water, but that’s another issue…) [3]

• In some areas where wood and charcoal are scarce, more than a quarter of a family’s income is spent on fuel.

• Charcoal production is an important contributing factor in the deforestation of the tropical belt. Deforestation accounts for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s more than the emissions produced by trains, planes, ships, cars, and trucks worldwide. (My note)

The Charcoal Project is a web-based resource that explores the challenges and solutions facing charcoal production and its impacts around the world.

At The Charcoal Project we  want to discuss all aspects of the issue. But we are especially eager to connect individuals and communities on the ground willing to share their experiences producing energy efficient stoves and manufacturing biofuels brickets.

You will also find here stories and ideas that are not directly connect to charcoal production and consumption. For example, we might explore legislative issues, an interesting study, a look at alternative fuels, or even put up a slideshow or video. So please send us content you wish to share!

And thank you for being patient while we build this blog!

J. Kim Chaix

The Charcoal Project

Brooklyn, NY

USA

DISCLAIMER: The Charcoal Project is a private, individual effort and is not affiliated with any institution, government, or company. It is intended as a public service whose purpose is to connect all those interested in this topic. We try to credit all sources of information and welcome our readers to report any errors or oversight. Thank you for supporting us!