Rewarding emissions reductions is a pretty weird perverse incentive. Those who emit the most await the greatest reward. Carbon credits are in general pretty stupid, a carbon tax is what is needed.
Sometimes I think we should have only an LVT and a carbon tax. Every year the government would tally up how much it spent and send out bills for land ownership and carbon emissions. There would be no deficits, the goverment would necessarilly collect as much as it spent (with the exception of non payment), and it would eliminate all need for any tax beurocracy and record keeping.
> Every year the government would tally up how much it spent
Sounds simple. How would you limit how much government plans to spend? Like, "oh yeah, we can now do everything we want, because we don't have any ceiling, we just offload it on land owners". There would still need to be some kind of budget.
IMHO we need both taxes and incentives. Use the taxes to pay for the incentives. Make the polluters pay for the fix. That would be fair but we don't live in a fair world.
Carbon taxes seem a lot more controversial (especially among anti-tax populists) than incentives are because "borrowing" (aka printing money) is a nice loophole where you can have lots of incentives without taxing people for it.
Incentives are less controversial and a lot easier to implement. Everybody likes benefitting from incentives. And they work. Republicans hate increasing taxes but they love printing money as much as the Democrats do. They only are in favor of reducing the deficit when they are not in power. When they are, the deficit goes up. That was true under Trump, both Bush presidencies. And even Reagan spent more than he cut and increased the deficit. Spending is just easier than cutting. Economies are not circular. You don't have to raise every penny you spend via taxes.
That's also how the inflation reduction act works. Which is an ironic name because printing an extra trillion or so dollars is going to have some inflationary effects. But it undeniably has a great stimulating impact as well as there now is a lot of economic activity around renewable energy that is creating a lot of growth, jobs, etc. A trillion $ in new taxes would have most of the US population picking up pitchforks and heading out to lynch politicians. Sadly, some of that goes straight to the oil and gas industry though. But at least they now pretend a bit harder that they don't want to continue to rake in billions by getting us to buy oil and gas for as long as they can get away with that.
I would simply tax the sale of fossil fuels. Sure, there are other major sources of carbon in agriculture, but for every gram of carbon from fossile fuels oil, gas or coal is bought or mined. I would go with the simple thing, I don't think carbon emissions from agricultural tillage need be taxed.
Well for fossil fuels there is a pretty straightforward calculation for emissions per unit of fuel. You can tax it at the point of sale to the end customer. Are their non fossil fuel carbon emissions that are hard to count?
In New Zealand we have a pretty effective system that covers all fossil fuel use nationally, as well as several other greenhouse gas emission classes (notably not agricultural emissions though hopefully they’re included soon). The EU has something similar as do several other jurisdictions. It’s a solved problem at scale.
In NZ we also have an effective system for recognising and incentivising certain classes of forest carbon removals (which I think are a legitimate and important class of credits - unlike avoided emission credits which I agree are junk).
for anything fuel-based (both fossil and "renewable" such as wood pellets and biogas), we know how much CO2 a given quantity of fuel emits. Place a tax on the importers and producers of the raw material, that's it.
Other processes that emit greenhouse gases - especially construction and agriculture such as cow farms - are a bit more difficult to calculate, but there's enough data available to make reasonable averages.
> roughly 2.4 billion people around the world cook with smoky solid fuels or kerosene contributing [...] approximately 2% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
So, a huge project is set up to change the lifestyle (food preparation) of almost a third of the world population. To remove at most 2% of greenhouse gas emissions?
Is there really no lower hanging fruit? (Or is that low hanging fruit, a cynical me guesses, requiring change to the lifestyles of rich western people?)
> So, a huge project is set up to change the lifestyle (food preparation) of almost a third of the world population. To remove at most 2% of greenhouse gas emissions?
And improve health outcomes, these things are bad for people breathing nearby - especially when used in small areas.
You have actually cut out
> contributing to 2 to 3 million premature deaths annually
I deliberately cut that from the sentence to focus on the carbon emission part.
Which is neglegible. I think the part that improves health and reduces death, is extremely valuable. But important like vaccinations, sewers and food programs are important.
It is measurable, it improves the standard of living of those affected, and has other environmental benefits.
On the measurable, the fact that some has found that the measures were wrong is encouraging. It can be monitored. When will we find out if tree planting offsets do not happen? Years or decades down the line. In this case I think it is probably fixable - obviously the new stoves are not as good from the users point of view. I suspect outside experts designing things without user input -
they should be treated as customers and their feedback incorporated early.
I think you are entirely right about reluctance to change some people's lifestyles, but is not as simple as "rich western" vs "poor non-western". For one thing, the world is not longer that simple - there are plenty of rich non-western countries. Even economies that are not as rich per capita as a whole, have both substantial rich groups and regions within them and they have large economies (and CO2 eomissions) in total.
The problem you mention happens a lot within countries. It looks to me as though, for example, net zero policies in the UK will affect the lifestyle of the rich far less than that of the hoi polloi.
> It is measurable, it improves the standard of living of those affected, and has other environmental benefits.
The last two parts have nothing to do with greenhouse emission reduction. They are important, don't get me wrong. And valuable.
But if the only reason to start reducing greenhouse emissions in a sector is "it is measurable", we are doing a poor job. Because I am certain there's far lower-hanging-fruit, that is also measurable, but simply not as popular as "these other people have to change their lifestyle" and therefore omitted.
Edit: I am specifically thinking about severely reducing meat from our diets (i.e. go partially, or entirely vegetarian), or about not flying to Bali for a 2 week holiday. Because those are far bigger than 2% globally. Estimates go to resp. 30% and 15%. Reduce half of all of them, and the "cooking on wood" might reduce 1% (which acc. to the article actually is merely 0.1%) and 15% or 7.5% resp. It is blindingly obvious what has the biggest impact on greenhouse gas emission reduction.
Encouraging is not the term I would use. This has been known for years. There was a huge piece of journalism a couple of years (which I am unable to find atm, I'll edit it in if I find it) ago that went through a bunch of carbon offsets projects including this one and already revealed the problems with it.
If anything this just shows that even though problems are revealed, they keep happening, and companies keep getting away with their greenwashing claims. That is the exact opposite of encouraging.
> To remove at most 2% of greenhouse gas emissions?
The problem with this argument is that everything is a small percentage contribution if you break it down enough.
At the moment some UK politicians are saying the UK shouldn't be concerned about reducing emissions because the UK only contributes about 1% to global emissions (we also have ~1% of the world's population which I think rather negates this argument).
2% is a lot. If we want to tackle this problem in a reasonable timescale we need to go for the low hanging fruit, the high hanging fruit, and all the fruit in between.
2% may be a lot, especially in absolute numbers.
But it costs money and effort to decrease that. Money and effort that cannot be spend elsewhere.
I'm quite certain that efforts such as "taxing kerosine on international flights", "charge VAT for flights", or even "removing all subsidies for beef and pork production in the EU" have a much larger effect. So if we can spare our effort or funds only once, those would be much more obvious places to start.
As I said elsewhere: if CO2 emission reduction comes for free with a project that tries to fix health issues with cooking, then fine. But let's not pretend we are doing anything to save our (ability to live on) the planet here.
There’s certainly low-hanging fruit. If the top 10% of emitters reduced their emissions to that of the average European person, global emissions would fall by 30%.
1/4th of global population producing 2% of emissions for cooking seems entirely reasonable use of our global emission budget. Absolutely zero wrong there.
Now other emissions such as particulate could be helpful for their well being. Which is also reasonable goal...
Now involving carbon markets for reducing these emissions, that is just green washing and should not happen.
> 1/4th of global population producing 2% of emissions for cooking seems entirely reasonable use of our global emission budget. Absolutely zero wrong there.
Exactly my point. And while it may be good to strive to even reduce that, currently there are far lower-hanging-fruit that give a much larger win for far less investment.
That is, if this -at most- 2% reduction comes for "free" because changing is something we need to do for other reasons (health, budget, etc) then fine, any win is a win. But from the article I get that a rather large system is set up to measure, offset and calculate the greenhouse emission of this -IMO- negligible contribution. It begs the question "why is air travel largely excempted from the same system of certification"? Or "why is meat and farming in general not put under the same scrutiny"?
I mean, you talk like this is the only project of this sort. There's _lots_ of lower hanging fruit, but it is being picked. See electric cars, forestry, biodiesel and a million other things.
Even without any carbon reduction, this would be worth doing, though, and there were charities who worked in this even before carbon credits were a thing. Household air pollution kills 3.8 million people a year (over half of the deaths from _all_ air pollution!), and it's mostly associated with cookstoves.
> The fastest growing type of offset on the global carbon market subsidizes the distribution of efficient cookstoves in developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
'fastest growing' can be quite deceptive, if the fast-growing thing is relatively small.
Matt Levine's newsletter occasionally covers the carbon credits market; it gets _weird_.
I would be interested in lower handing fruits that does not for 1/4 of the population to change. If we change consumption / spending habits that will also propagate.
Personally, I think politicians are doing a really good job in trying to balance things.
Eg. It should be super easy to increase taxes on one-family detached houses and cars. This would almost immediately lead to reduced emissions – so this fruit is almost on the ground.
However, the truth is that people don't want to live in apartments and take public transport.
It would have been even easier to, for instance, never allow the extraction of bituminous sands and tight oil : cannot burn something that was never extracted !
But as Tony Blair's aide explained so clearly, politicians have nothing to gain in trying to prevent these issues, and everything to lose, because the average voter doesn't give a shit about even the near future.
> (Or is that low hanging fruit, a cynical me guesses, requiring change to the lifestyles of rich western people?)
Likely this, plus the fossil fuel lobby (many of whom are not "western" but are very very rich), plus the leadership in several "developing" countries such as Russia, China and India hedging their energy bets.
Nobody has mentioned that these projects have another intention/effect: they make poor people more dependent on global supply chains and the monetary system. Instead of using cheap/free, local, sustainably grown wood, or cow dung, they’re required to purchase LPG containers or pellets produced in distant factories (probably from unsustainably harvested wood in other countries). Or they’re dependent on the electric grid, which may be unreliable and expensive.
These projects may reduce emissions, and they may improve health outcomes, but they also keep the poor subjugated by the global industrial system. That must be a factor in the programs’ popularity — it’s another way to extract wealth from the poor.
I’m a carbon analyst and have worked on the meta-analysis of cookstove methodologies. I find myself in close agreement with Gill-Wiehl et al.’s recommendations, particularly on the following:
Gold Standard methodologies are more thorough, with the greatest credibility in a metered approach.
Only advanced ICS and fuel switch technologies have material health benefits, although regional and cultural suitability is key (electric cookers don’t make sense in remote regions where energy infrastructure is usually limited).
fNRB is frequently over-estimated, but the latest MoFuSS model values are set at the national level, and correcting the data inputs to be locally specific may improve the accuracy of the results.
Nevertheless, the stark reality remains: four million people die every year from illnesses associated with smoke from cooking. The need to transition towards better living conditions cannot be ignored, nor can the impact of carbon finance today, which has already driven millions of households toward cleaner practices.
I hope this study represents a turning point for the cookstove sector, helping to sift out the biased methodologies and over-crediting techniques which have brought its reputation into dispute. I have confidence that the development of more robust methodologies (including the works of 4C led by the Clean Cooking Alliance) and quality indicators such as the CCPs, will ensure the longevity of these projects.
I want to see stoves that can burn wet wood, manure, fresh leaves, etc.
It is clearly possible to do from a physics standpoint - but the trick is how to do it in a robust, easy to use, and low particulate emissions way.
High efficiency stoves also tend to be very hard to get lit - since they only really function when everything is at operating temperature. That problem needs to be solved - perhaps for example by storing gasified fuel from the previous use to start it next time.
Stoves without a catalytic converter can burn wet wood, it's just that most of the heat goes out the chimney until the wood is dry. Also, where the inefficiency comes from. No way around heating water prior to combustion afaik.
No, but you can recondense the water afterwards to get the energy back.
Condensing boilers are commonly used for burning natural gas and petroleum fuels already. They just have a pipe out the side that dribbles condensate water.
The problem with recondensing smoke from a wood fire is you tend to end up with lots of tar and end up with a sticky mess. However, if your burn hot enough with good mixing and the right air fuel mixture, that won't happen.
Unfortunately that's hard to achieve without a computer monitoring temperatures and oxygen levels and adjusting fans etc. Which obviously makes your device much more complex, less repairable, and expensive.
Start with something more flammable than wet wood or with electric lighter. Burning wet wood and fresh leaves - it's more practical to dry them first with leftover heat from chimney. Otherwise they need high temperature.
Sure. But it turns out that wood ideally takes multiple years to dry, and the vast majority of people don't collect wood from the forest 2 years in advance. (Think about the effective interest rate on your time - you are putting in effort 2 years before seeing the benefits).
Instead, they collect wood 1 month before they use it (saving that 'interest'), and live with the fact their stove is a bit smokey.
But they are unaware that their smokey stove is giving them lung cancer and making their family sick too.
A stove design that could handle wet wood efficiently and without giving out deadly smoke would save a lot of lives and help the environment.
The majority of the underdeveloped world has no way to achieve that in the near term. The healthier more efficient solution is indeed higher efficiency fuel stoves. The great part of that is it can also spur new business with the help of NGOs/Governments/Funds etc. You get local businesses to make high efficiency stoves, subsidize for people who cannot afford, new businesses to make the fuel, thinking of things like charcoal or wood pellets (that one might be a little more complicated but still doable).
This reminds me of 12 years ago at NY Tech Meetup when some whartonites debuted a carbon credit marketplace and the first audience question was “is this a scam?”
Readit News
Sometimes I think we should have only an LVT and a carbon tax. Every year the government would tally up how much it spent and send out bills for land ownership and carbon emissions. There would be no deficits, the goverment would necessarilly collect as much as it spent (with the exception of non payment), and it would eliminate all need for any tax beurocracy and record keeping.
Sounds simple. How would you limit how much government plans to spend? Like, "oh yeah, we can now do everything we want, because we don't have any ceiling, we just offload it on land owners". There would still need to be some kind of budget.
Carbon taxes seem a lot more controversial (especially among anti-tax populists) than incentives are because "borrowing" (aka printing money) is a nice loophole where you can have lots of incentives without taxing people for it.
Incentives are less controversial and a lot easier to implement. Everybody likes benefitting from incentives. And they work. Republicans hate increasing taxes but they love printing money as much as the Democrats do. They only are in favor of reducing the deficit when they are not in power. When they are, the deficit goes up. That was true under Trump, both Bush presidencies. And even Reagan spent more than he cut and increased the deficit. Spending is just easier than cutting. Economies are not circular. You don't have to raise every penny you spend via taxes.
That's also how the inflation reduction act works. Which is an ironic name because printing an extra trillion or so dollars is going to have some inflationary effects. But it undeniably has a great stimulating impact as well as there now is a lot of economic activity around renewable energy that is creating a lot of growth, jobs, etc. A trillion $ in new taxes would have most of the US population picking up pitchforks and heading out to lynch politicians. Sadly, some of that goes straight to the oil and gas industry though. But at least they now pretend a bit harder that they don't want to continue to rake in billions by getting us to buy oil and gas for as long as they can get away with that.
That's a huge unsolved issue with the Carbon Tax AND Carbon Credits solutions. Your idea doesn't solve it.
In NZ we also have an effective system for recognising and incentivising certain classes of forest carbon removals (which I think are a legitimate and important class of credits - unlike avoided emission credits which I agree are junk).
for anything fuel-based (both fossil and "renewable" such as wood pellets and biogas), we know how much CO2 a given quantity of fuel emits. Place a tax on the importers and producers of the raw material, that's it.
Other processes that emit greenhouse gases - especially construction and agriculture such as cow farms - are a bit more difficult to calculate, but there's enough data available to make reasonable averages.
So, a huge project is set up to change the lifestyle (food preparation) of almost a third of the world population. To remove at most 2% of greenhouse gas emissions?
Is there really no lower hanging fruit? (Or is that low hanging fruit, a cynical me guesses, requiring change to the lifestyles of rich western people?)
And improve health outcomes, these things are bad for people breathing nearby - especially when used in small areas.
You have actually cut out
> contributing to 2 to 3 million premature deaths annually
from the sentence!
Which is neglegible. I think the part that improves health and reduces death, is extremely valuable. But important like vaccinations, sewers and food programs are important.
2 to 3 million less carbon emitters annually /s.
On the measurable, the fact that some has found that the measures were wrong is encouraging. It can be monitored. When will we find out if tree planting offsets do not happen? Years or decades down the line. In this case I think it is probably fixable - obviously the new stoves are not as good from the users point of view. I suspect outside experts designing things without user input - they should be treated as customers and their feedback incorporated early.
I think you are entirely right about reluctance to change some people's lifestyles, but is not as simple as "rich western" vs "poor non-western". For one thing, the world is not longer that simple - there are plenty of rich non-western countries. Even economies that are not as rich per capita as a whole, have both substantial rich groups and regions within them and they have large economies (and CO2 eomissions) in total.
Also, it is western countries that have reduced their emissions the most. I linked to a blog post of mine with a graph before: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/03/co2-emissions-will-keep-risin... on HN.
The problem you mention happens a lot within countries. It looks to me as though, for example, net zero policies in the UK will affect the lifestyle of the rich far less than that of the hoi polloi.
The last two parts have nothing to do with greenhouse emission reduction. They are important, don't get me wrong. And valuable.
But if the only reason to start reducing greenhouse emissions in a sector is "it is measurable", we are doing a poor job. Because I am certain there's far lower-hanging-fruit, that is also measurable, but simply not as popular as "these other people have to change their lifestyle" and therefore omitted. Edit: I am specifically thinking about severely reducing meat from our diets (i.e. go partially, or entirely vegetarian), or about not flying to Bali for a 2 week holiday. Because those are far bigger than 2% globally. Estimates go to resp. 30% and 15%. Reduce half of all of them, and the "cooking on wood" might reduce 1% (which acc. to the article actually is merely 0.1%) and 15% or 7.5% resp. It is blindingly obvious what has the biggest impact on greenhouse gas emission reduction.
If anything this just shows that even though problems are revealed, they keep happening, and companies keep getting away with their greenwashing claims. That is the exact opposite of encouraging.
The problem with this argument is that everything is a small percentage contribution if you break it down enough.
At the moment some UK politicians are saying the UK shouldn't be concerned about reducing emissions because the UK only contributes about 1% to global emissions (we also have ~1% of the world's population which I think rather negates this argument).
2% is a lot. If we want to tackle this problem in a reasonable timescale we need to go for the low hanging fruit, the high hanging fruit, and all the fruit in between.
I'm quite certain that efforts such as "taxing kerosine on international flights", "charge VAT for flights", or even "removing all subsidies for beef and pork production in the EU" have a much larger effect. So if we can spare our effort or funds only once, those would be much more obvious places to start.
As I said elsewhere: if CO2 emission reduction comes for free with a project that tries to fix health issues with cooking, then fine. But let's not pretend we are doing anything to save our (ability to live on) the planet here.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitte...
There’s certainly low-hanging fruit. If the top 10% of emitters reduced their emissions to that of the average European person, global emissions would fall by 30%.
Now other emissions such as particulate could be helpful for their well being. Which is also reasonable goal...
Now involving carbon markets for reducing these emissions, that is just green washing and should not happen.
Exactly my point. And while it may be good to strive to even reduce that, currently there are far lower-hanging-fruit that give a much larger win for far less investment. That is, if this -at most- 2% reduction comes for "free" because changing is something we need to do for other reasons (health, budget, etc) then fine, any win is a win. But from the article I get that a rather large system is set up to measure, offset and calculate the greenhouse emission of this -IMO- negligible contribution. It begs the question "why is air travel largely excempted from the same system of certification"? Or "why is meat and farming in general not put under the same scrutiny"?
I mean, you talk like this is the only project of this sort. There's _lots_ of lower hanging fruit, but it is being picked. See electric cars, forestry, biodiesel and a million other things.
Even without any carbon reduction, this would be worth doing, though, and there were charities who worked in this even before carbon credits were a thing. Household air pollution kills 3.8 million people a year (over half of the deaths from _all_ air pollution!), and it's mostly associated with cookstoves.
> The fastest growing type of offset on the global carbon market subsidizes the distribution of efficient cookstoves in developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
'fastest growing' can be quite deceptive, if the fast-growing thing is relatively small.
Matt Levine's newsletter occasionally covers the carbon credits market; it gets _weird_.
I would be interested in lower handing fruits that does not for 1/4 of the population to change. If we change consumption / spending habits that will also propagate.
Personally, I think politicians are doing a really good job in trying to balance things.
Eg. It should be super easy to increase taxes on one-family detached houses and cars. This would almost immediately lead to reduced emissions – so this fruit is almost on the ground.
However, the truth is that people don't want to live in apartments and take public transport.
But as Tony Blair's aide explained so clearly, politicians have nothing to gain in trying to prevent these issues, and everything to lose, because the average voter doesn't give a shit about even the near future.
Likely this, plus the fossil fuel lobby (many of whom are not "western" but are very very rich), plus the leadership in several "developing" countries such as Russia, China and India hedging their energy bets.
These projects may reduce emissions, and they may improve health outcomes, but they also keep the poor subjugated by the global industrial system. That must be a factor in the programs’ popularity — it’s another way to extract wealth from the poor.
Dead Comment
Gold Standard methodologies are more thorough, with the greatest credibility in a metered approach.
Only advanced ICS and fuel switch technologies have material health benefits, although regional and cultural suitability is key (electric cookers don’t make sense in remote regions where energy infrastructure is usually limited).
fNRB is frequently over-estimated, but the latest MoFuSS model values are set at the national level, and correcting the data inputs to be locally specific may improve the accuracy of the results.
(I discuss these topics in depth in an article posted by Abatable last November: https://www.abatable.com/blog/which-methodologies-will-help-...)
Nevertheless, the stark reality remains: four million people die every year from illnesses associated with smoke from cooking. The need to transition towards better living conditions cannot be ignored, nor can the impact of carbon finance today, which has already driven millions of households toward cleaner practices.
I hope this study represents a turning point for the cookstove sector, helping to sift out the biased methodologies and over-crediting techniques which have brought its reputation into dispute. I have confidence that the development of more robust methodologies (including the works of 4C led by the Clean Cooking Alliance) and quality indicators such as the CCPs, will ensure the longevity of these projects.
It is clearly possible to do from a physics standpoint - but the trick is how to do it in a robust, easy to use, and low particulate emissions way.
High efficiency stoves also tend to be very hard to get lit - since they only really function when everything is at operating temperature. That problem needs to be solved - perhaps for example by storing gasified fuel from the previous use to start it next time.
Condensing boilers are commonly used for burning natural gas and petroleum fuels already. They just have a pipe out the side that dribbles condensate water.
The problem with recondensing smoke from a wood fire is you tend to end up with lots of tar and end up with a sticky mess. However, if your burn hot enough with good mixing and the right air fuel mixture, that won't happen.
Unfortunately that's hard to achieve without a computer monitoring temperatures and oxygen levels and adjusting fans etc. Which obviously makes your device much more complex, less repairable, and expensive.
Instead, they collect wood 1 month before they use it (saving that 'interest'), and live with the fact their stove is a bit smokey.
But they are unaware that their smokey stove is giving them lung cancer and making their family sick too.
A stove design that could handle wet wood efficiently and without giving out deadly smoke would save a lot of lives and help the environment.
Firewood. Charcoal. Ethanol. LPG. Pellets.
In countries:
Bangladesh. Mexico. Ghana. Nigeria. Kenya.
Average home size:
4.2 people.
Dead Comment