Cleaner cooking

Building a better stove

By Culinate staff

January 6, 2010

At the end of 2009, the New Yorker ran a double issue on the theme of “World Changers,” with articles about China’s attempts to create a clean-energy industry, the effects of global warming on penguins, and the architect Zaha Hadid, among other topics.

Most intriguing, though, was Burkhard Bilger’s piece about stove designers and how their efforts to come up with cheap, clean-burning stoves for the Third World might reduce carbon emissions:

Given that cooking fires each release one or two thousand grams of soot in a year, and that three billion people rely on them, cleaning up those emissions may be the fastest, cheapest way to cool the planet.

And save a lot of human lungs from slow poisoning, too.