Clean smoke

While on India, the government has revealed a program to provide efficient cooking stoves to rural areas in an effort to reduce air pollution. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy announced the National Biomass Cook-stoves Initiative, a series of pilot projects that seeks to improve stove efficiency for individual households.
An estimated 826 million Indians depend on simple cook stoves that burn solid fuel, mainly fuel wood or coal. The toxic soot can increase the risks of developing pneumonia, cataracts, and tuberculosis.

A study on the benefits from greenhouse gas reductions in India, released last month in the British medical journal The Lancet, estimates that 15 million improved stoves distributed every year for the next decade would supply 87 percent of households across India. Such a program would avoid premature deaths from respiratory infections, heart disease, and bronchitis by more than 17 percent, affecting some 55.5 million people, the study had recommended.

More-efficient biomass stoves can reduce India's climate impact as well. When soot settles on light-colored snow or ice, less sunlight is reflected into space. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its 2007 assessment that soot, also referred to as black carbon, is one of the most potent greenhouse pollutants. Eliminating black carbon could quickly limit global warming due to the short period of time the particles remain in the atmosphere.

An estimated 0.5-1 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent gases, notably methane, black carbon, and carbon monoxide, would be avoided, according to the study, led by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the University of California at Berkeley, and University College London.

The India plan is good but needs to be seen what kind of target for the program is established. If this is simply a good looking plan to take to Copenhagen or will be implemented in earnest, time will tell. Till then, millions will be smoking polluted air and burning wood inefficiently.