While the developed world wrestles with curbing carbon emissions
from luxuries like personal automobiles and the multi-megawatt
power plants that keep homes and offices at a comfortable 72
degrees, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is engineering an
ambitious bottom-up approach to reduce emissions in the third
world: providing cleaner cooking stoves. Clinton aims to
introduce 100 million clean stoves to poor people the world over
by 2020. With two military entanglements cooking up trouble in
volatile parts of the world, the threat of international
terrorism omnipresent, and the budget stretched as thin as a
busted economy can stretch it, it might seem like an unlikely
time for worldwide kitchen renovations. But cooking smoke is a
bigger threat than it seems. Aside from belching tons of black
carbon into the atmosphere daily, cooking smoke produced in
poorly ventilated areas is estimated to shorten the lives of 1.9
million people annually.These stoves generally run on wood (or,
worse, rubbish) and are the go-