(Adam Andrzejewski, RealClear Wire) The Environmental Protection Agency is spending $3 million to explore cleaner cooking methods and ways to reduce household energy emissions.
“Three billion people around the world, including 600,000 low-income Americans, cook their food and/or heat their homes over open fires or with rudimentary stoves using biomass fuel (e.g., wood, dung, crop residues) and/or coal,” according to the funding opportunity.
It adds that, “emissions from these practices expose people to extraordinarily high levels of indoor air pollution that causes approximately 3.2 million premature deaths worldwide annually.”
It also emphasizes the negative impact the carbon emissions these cooking and heating practices have on the climate.
To remedy this, the grant will support research that will increase the use of clean, reliable, affordable, efficient, and safe home cooking and heating practices.
It specifically emphasizes that this research should be conducted in, “Africa, Asia, and Latin America to identify effective approaches, share lessons learned, and more rapidly assimilate insights and innovations from around the world into strategies and programs being deployed in these areas of the world.”
It’s fairly obvious that most using wood stoves and open fires are doing so because of poverty. It doesn’t take $3 million to conclude that a solution to this is funding safer and more efficient heat sources.
