Hillary Clinton, “Hard Choices” and the Founding of the Alliance
The publication of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s new book, Hard Choices, is bound to give the issue of clean cookstoves and efficient cooking fuels much higher visibility. Released on June 10th, Hard Choices covers a lot of territory and is garnering a lot of instant attention. For the broad Cookstoves sector, perhaps the most important topic Secretary Clinton covers is her discussion of the impetus to globally address inefficient cooking and her role in founding the Alliance.
“If you’ve ever built a campfire or tried to cook outdoors, you likely know what it feels like when the wind changes direction and black smoke fills your lungs. It can bring tears to your eyes. Now imagine if, instead of being a rare outdoor activity, this was something you experienced daily, inside your own home. That’s what happens to 3 billion people around the world who gather every day around open fires or old and inefficient stoves in small kitchens and poorly ventilated houses. Women labor over these hearths for hours, often with their babies strapped to their back, and they spend hours more gathering wood for fuel. The food they prepare is different on every continent, but the air they breathe is the same: a toxic mix of chemicals released by burning wood or other solid fuel that can reach two hundred times the amount the EPA considers safe. As the women cook, smoke fills their lungs, and the toxins begin poisoning them and their children. The black carbon, methane, and other “super pollutants” released in this smoke also contribute to climate change.”
Secretary Clinton writes about how cooking smoke from open fires and dirty stoves is one of the most serious health risks in developing countries. She cites the World Health Organization’s Global Burden of Disease report from March that shows the high number of premature deaths from household air pollution – 4.3 million individuals in 2012.
The mix of health and disease concerns together with danger to women and children spurred Secretary Clinton to take action on this “deeply troubling and consequential challenge.” It was at the annual Clinton Global Initiative fall event in 2010 that her desire to make change spurred the formation of the Alliance.
“The Alliance decided to pursue a market-based approach to persuade companies to build clean, efficient, and affordable stoves and fuels. We set an ambitious goal: 100 million homes adopting new clean stoves and fuels by 2020. We knew how difficult this would be, from the technical challenge of designing cheap, safe, clean, and durable stoves to the logistical challenge of distributing them all over the world and the social challenge of convincing consumers to actually embrace them. But we hoped that technological breakthroughs and growing private-sector engagement would allow us to succeed. On behalf of the U.S. government, I announced a pledge of $50 million to get the effort going.”
Although Clinton has now left the State Department she remains involved with the Alliance as an Honorary Chair of the Leadership Council. Be sure to check out everything Secretary Clinton says about Cookstoves and the Alliance. Just turn to pages 523-525 of Hard Choices.