Clean Stoves for The Third World
“When the United Nations, Hillary Clinton and Glenn Beck are exercised over the same idea, something must be cooking. Bad pun aside, that’s what it is — cook stoves for the Third World that protect life, health and the environment, while answering the age-old question of what’s for dinner.”
In September, the U.N. General Assembly kicked off the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a part of the Clinton Global Initiative promoted by the U.N. Foundation. As for Beck, the Fox News Channel talk show host who is neither for nor against the stoves, he sees Clinton’s spending $50 million on promotion and production as part of an elitist plot to redistribute the world’s wealth.”
Back to the stoves. According to the U.N. News Centre, this action, backed by U.N. Environment Programme, “holds the promise of saving lives, uplifting health, improving regional environments, reducing deforestation, empowering local entrepreneurs, speeding development, and helping to stem global climate change” by dramatically boosting the efficiency of “some 3 billion cook stoves across Africa, Asia and Latin America.”
The reduction in global deforestation would be a result of felling fewer trees for the wood and other biomass used in the Third World’s primitive cook stoves. The environment would also benefit in other ways. Research conducted by the Atmospheric Brown Cloud Project, also UNEP-supported, indicates that black carbon — a suspected villain in the accelerating melting rates of glaciers in mountain ranges like the Himalayas — could account for 10 to 40 percent of climate change.”