Cardboard Oven
There is a new case at www.gentleaction.org/cases. It is the winner of the Climate Change Challenge, sponsored by the Financial Times and Forum for the Future. Jon Bøhmer has invented a solar powered cardboard oven that can cook food and bake bread. Most importantly it can boil water to eliminate water born diseases that kill millions of children each year.
You can find the video below at http://sustainableenergyinafrica.ning.com/video/kyoto-box
While I feel that the cardboard box oven is an interesting and useful idea I do have considerable reservations about the Youtube video which appears to be a promotional tool that glosses over many important issues.
It focusses on a woman who collects wood in a particular area where it is dangerous for a single woman to be in a forest on her own. But this cannot be true for most wooded areas. It suggests that collecting wood is something that in itself is not a desirable occupation – but it is a tradition in many areas of the world. It hints at possible physical injury from collecting wood, yet industrial accidents also occur when people erect solar panels on houses.
This may appear to be nit picking issues yet I would suggest that they all point to an over simplification of some highly complex questions of which we have only a partial understanding, yet on the other hand it is so very easy and attractive to take a political stance on such issues as being either “good” or “bad”.
However, the particular point, amongst others in this video, that I would question is that of the “carbon footprint”. It argues that by using a cardboard oven someone in a highly forested area of Africa is reducing their carbon footprint and so helping to save the planet from global warming. My agrument here is that I certaintly do not know if this is true and, moreover, I am not at all clear if a variety of experts have any idea of what are the global implications of a small community burning wood in a forested area would have on the fate of the planet.
Global warming is a serious issue and greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide and methane – are clearly the leading culprits. However in a forested area carbon dioxide is “breathed in” by trees and, with the help of sunlight, the carbon becomes part of the photosynthesis process that helps trees to grow. In other words has anyone any idea of the implications of burning small amounts of wood within a heavily wooded region? Do small communities who burn wood have a negative effect on the planet, or is the whole thing a matter of fostering an equlibrium within a particular region – something very different than flying transAtlantic in a jet or using your car when you could easily walk to the corner store?
Quite another point is the maintaining the good order of forested areas for the avoidance of forest fires – which certainly would have a significant carbon imprint. So indeed it is a useful thing to clear areas of a forest from time to time – which of course has little to do with local people collecting wood, but implies management on a larger scale.
I think the point I’m making here is that again and again we would like to be presented with a series of easy solutions, simplistic slogans and black and white choices.
The oven seems to me an excellent idea yet its implact, for me, has been subverted by what I feel is a politically biased promotional video.
