Green Cooking
New technologies are now widely expected to be the silver bullet for the intractable political stalemate over how to deal with global pollution, rising CO2 levels, and climate change. Waiting for politicians to get their acts together is getting old and is often unproductive. There has been considerable progress in many respects, but as the new administration of Donald Trump has shown, progress can be set back years, even decades, by short-term economic interests or ignorance.
Biomass Cookstoves to the Rescue
Take new efficient biomass cookstoves as an example. To date, people all over the globe have continued to use traditional open fires which emit carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere. The biomass cookstove, much like a pellet stove, reduces these emissions. For more on this, see “Bioenergy and Climate Change Mitigation: An Assessment.”
Global Energy Assessments include a look at renewable energy resources and their prospects for helping reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The IPCC’s Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SSREN) provides a special summary of the full report and includes:
- Renewable energy and climate change
- Bioenergy
- Direct Solar Energy
- Geothermal Energy
- Hydropower
- Ocean Energy
- Wind Energy
- Renewable energy technologies and markets
- Integration into present and future energy systems
- Renewable energy and sustainable development
- Mitigation potentials and costs
- Policy, implementation, and financing
- Advancing knowledge about renewable energy
The following video shows a biomass cookstove. There are many types. According to the inventor:
“This is a stove I made to efficiently cook with biomass. The basket insert shown is for wood pellets but it can use other combustibles such as wood chips, sticks, charcoal and biomass briquettes etc. Several different burn baskets inserts are in the works including the other one shown that will have a bellows hook up in a future video and perhaps an alcohol insert too. I find wood pellets to be a great advantage because they burn hot and steady for at least 30 minutes with one charge. Fresh pellets can be loaded in the coal catch pot which preheat, begin to burn and can then be used to “top up” giving you continuous cooking. A thin high carbon wok is very efficient by itself but watch through to the end of the video you can use pots, pans, Dutch ovens etc.”
