Jean Kim Chaix

(Reporter William Wheeler writes about Haiti’s addiction to biomass in the most recent issue of Good Magazine)

Elizabeth Sipple, an agronomist who recently took a post as the director of International Lifeline Fund’s Haiti program, is working to wean Haiti off a lethal addiction: wood and charcoal, which supply the majority of Haiti’s energy needs.

The main source of revenue in the countryside is cutting trees for firewood and charcoal production—part of a hugely inefficient wood habit that consumes trees much more quickly than they can regenerate.

This dependency has cost the country its forests, sapped its fertility, and set the stage for an increasing series of natural disasters, including—by driving migration into the congested, anarchically-constructed capital—the human impact of the earthquake that killed roughly a quarter of a million people.

We are thrilled that the good people at E Magazine have chosen to feature The Charcoal Project’s work in their latest issue!

Thanks, E Magazine!

Lost kittens is what we call the odds and ends we collect from the internet to share with you. As 2010 draws to close, we think this is a great time to thank all of you who have written to encourage us since we embarked on our mission only one year ago. Your words of

What’s most glaring about this cool infographic on global investment in clean energy is not how much is invested around the world, but how little is invested in Africa, where over 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa depends on wood, charcoal, and animal dung for cooking and heating. This graphic also raises a larger question: what

News roundup on Cancun

The piece that really caught our eye was an editorial by the Wall Street Journal on Saturday which all but sealed the coffin on multi-lateralism and a UN-brokered solution to Climate Change in Cancun.

The reason we’ve chosen to share the nay-sayer’s perspective is because that US remains a major emitter of greenhouse gases and there exists a powerful lobby of Climate Change-deniers that have grown increasingly confident since the sweep by Republicans in the recent November mid-term elections.

OPINION

When it comes to deploying energy efficient technologies — like clean cookstoves, improved charcoal-making kilns, and sustainable alternatives to wood, charcoal, and animal dung fuels for the world’s three billion energy poor — the ratio of words to action and funding has, until recently, been woefully lopsided.