How ethics underpins all of the UNFCCC decisions
“If ninety-eight doctors say my son is ill and needs medication, and two say ‘No, he doesn’t he is fine.’ I will go with the ninety-eight. It’s common sense – the same with global warming. We go with the majority, the large majority.” — Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California
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For a typical mom in a rural village of India or Ethiopia, breakfast does not involve take-away Starbucks, micro-waved oatmeal, frozen waffles, or sparkling tableware extracted from an automatic dishwasher. Instead, it usually consists of leaning over a wood-burning stove for many hours every morning, inhaling pollution while cooking for your family. This scenario exists for millions of moms in India, China, South America, Indonesia, as well as Africa. While traditional cooking has a fairly small energy footprint compared to western cooking, it emits black carbon (otherwise known as soot). Two major ethical, economic, and ecological issues surround these cook-stoves: fire wood (a declining resource for many developing countries), and black carbon (a by-product of cooking with wood linked to health risks and global warming). The outcomes of COP15 may directly impact mothers cooking breakfast around the world, as governments strive to create policies to control carbon emissions on a global scale.
Black carbon, commonly called soot, results from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels or biomass such as wood. Common sources of soot are wild fires, diesel engines, wood stoves (or other bio-fuels), and agricultural burn-off. When soot disperses into the air and settles on surfaces, it accelerates global warming, second only to carbon dioxide emissions. But the good news is that soot disintegrates from the atmosphere after only a few days or weeks, whereas carbon dioxide lasts for centuries. So, the eradication of soot could slow down the planet’s current warming trends, providing more time to develop clean energy technologies such as solar, wind, nuclear, and hydrogen.
Soot has a two-fold effect on climate change – its dark particles not only warm the air but they also melt the ice or snow upon which they land. Scientific evidence indicates that black carbon may cause up to 50% of the Arctic ice melt; when the black particles settle on ice and snow, they reduce surface reflectivity and increase melting rates. Himalayan glaciers may lose up to 75% of their ice by the year 2020, accelerated by wind-dispersed soot throughout southeast Asia and China. In addition, soot causes lung disease in women and children who use wood-burning stoves.
Eradication of soot proves a “quick-fix” or relatively short-term solution to abate rising global temperatures as compared to the challenges of removing carbon dioxide emissions. Yet it poses enormous ethical issues. Should villagers in developing countries who use very little energy during their entire lifetimes (as compared to Americans and other developed countries) give up their stoves to pay for climate change? Nonetheless, the recent discovery of soot’s significance could also lead to win-win solutions. If developed countries take the lead to design technologies for cleaner stoves, developing countries could become the beneficiaries of cleaner cooking. And if people who use large amounts of energy contribute to the purchase and distribution of clean cook-stoves, this effort could buy time to enable new energy technologies to offset the more serious issue of carbon dioxide emissions.
Scientists and policy-makers at COP15 consider the reduction of soot a “low-hanging fruit” which can be plucked quickly to delay the otherwise dire consequences of rising global temperatures. What about a million-dollar prize for designing a clean cook-stove? It must be not only durable, but also produce food that tastes good to the users. Solar-powered stoves would reduce soot by as much as 90%. But replacing hundreds of millions of cook-stoves is no easy task. Still, energy experts believe that changing the cook-stoves of 3 billion people may actually be easier than changing the energy habits of 300 million Americans. What is ethical? Should mothers in India be restricted from their old ways of cooking, while American moms have been belching significantly larger carbon emissions into the atmosphere for 50 years? Who pays for whom, and how can the proverbial energy pie be carved equitably? From an ethical perspective, it does not seem acceptable for 3 billion people to eliminate their small energy footprint, when their counterparts in America have had an enormous energy footprint for several generations. These are some of complex issues under negotiation at the UNFCCC in Copenhagen this month. The outcomes will shape the world’s energy future; but more importantly, they may also foster sensitivity for human ethics as an underpinning of planetary stewardship.