Tag Archives: poverty

Harness the Sun, Cheaply

The photovoltaic panel isn’t the only hot technology under the sun. The solar cooker, a fuel-free alternative to the traditional stove, is another invention that can harness solar energy. While not as sophisticated as its photovoltaic cousin, the humble solar cooker is an important tool in sustainable development. It heats food by concentrating light onto a black pot using aluminum foil. Unlike a photovoltaic cell, a solar cooker requires neither rare earth metals nor integrated circuits. Its elegant simplicity makes it incredibly cheap to build. In fact, hand-made solar cookers are often made of ordinary junk lying around the house. But don’t let its modest, low-cost practicality fool you: solar cookers can reduce carbon emissions, protect forests, and enrich the poor.

To understand the value of the solar cooker, it’s important to grasp the drawbacks of a conventional stove. Every stove, whether it burns natural gas or firewood, requires fuel. Even an electric stove burns fuel, since electricity from the power grid comes from coal power plants. When fuel is burned, it generates carbon dioxide gas, which aggravates global warming. What’s worse, fuel often doesn’t burn cleanly. Incomplete combustion leads to smoke, which is made of particles that can irritate the lungs and eventually cause disease. The effects are worst for poor people cooking over fires with poor ventilation.

The price of the charcoal in the center is roughly the same price as any of the groups of food around it.

Overuse of cooking fuel leads to scarcity. Burning too much coal and natural gas depletes limited reserves, while burning too much firewood leads to deforestation. Fuel is also expensive, with the heaviest burden falling on the world’s ultra-poor. As much as half of a family’s income may be wasted on firewood alone. That income could have otherwise been invested in nutritious food, clean water, immunizations, and education. The world’s poor don’t have much money to burn.

The solar cooker provides an attractive solution. It runs entirely on clean, renewable solar energy. It produces no carbon emissions, requires no fuel, and saves one hundred percent of operating costs. Unlike with modern stoves, solar cookers can be built with common household items like cardboard, aluminum foil, glue, and a pair of scissors. A do-it-yourself version can be assembled in under an hour.

Solar cookers are based on simple principles. Light rays from the sun are not strong enough by themselves to cook food. Rays collected from a broad region, however, can be focused onto a small pot using reflective metal sheets to increase the delivered power. Pigments on a black pot absorb these light rays effectively to convert them into heat. On a hot day, a solar cooker can reach temperatures up to 165°C (330°F) — hot enough to boil, cook, and bake food.

The CooKit

The two essential components of a solar cooker are the pot and the reflective sheet metal. The ideal pot is black, since dark pigments work best for converting light rays into heat. White pots, or pots with shiny metal surfaces, do not work well because they reflect incoming light. The second component, the reflective sheet metal, is often aluminum foil because foil is cheap and widely available. The foil is glued onto a scaffold (often cardboard, sometimes an umbrella) so that it can help concentrate light rays onto the pot. Variations in design center around the arrangement of aluminum foil and the type of insulation the solar cooker uses.

Two styles of solar cookers are very popular: a box-style solar oven and a panel-style cooker. In a solar oven, the pot is insulated by durable oven walls lined with a reflective aluminum interior. Any heat-resistant scrap material, like bricks or fodder, can be used for insulation. By trapping in heat, a solar oven can maintain a uniform temperature and continue cooking for a few hours after sunset. A panel-style cooker, on the other hand, resembles a traditional stove. It only uses a thin plastic bag for insulation, but it has a large reflective surface that can capture plenty of light. Design plans for both styles are available free online. You can either buy one professionally made, or build one from scratch at no cost. Anyone up for a fun weekend project?

A box-style cooker (left) and a panel-style solar cooker (right)

One drawback of the solar cooker is that it heats more slowly than a conventional stove. With a solar cooker, meals take longer to cook and require advance preparation. The CooKit model, for example, requires double the heating time and has a maximum temperature of 120°C. This minor nuisance, however, actually provides unintended benefits. A steady, low-heat simplifies cooking since food cannot burn at 120°C. Once set up, cooking a meal requires no extra stirring or monitoring. There’s also less chance to start a fire.

Alas, there is another caveat: a solar cooker will not work in the dark. Extra insulation can help on overcast days, but don’t expect it to work during a blizzard. Because of this limitation, a solar cooker cannot fully substitute for a conventional stove. On sunny days, however, solar cookers are still the most cost-effective, light-impact cooking technology available.

Solar cookers have much to offer to the world’s poor. Solar Cookers International, the non-profit organization behind the CooKit, has distributed over 30,000 solar cookers in Africa. To help Darfuri women, it donated 10,000 CooKits to a refugee camp in Chad. Not only did these cookers help save fuel expenses, they also allowed women to prepare food without the need to venture outside camp, which reduced their risk of assault while attempting to gather firewood.

An umbrella solar cooker

Solar cookers, however, have been largely ignored in the West. It’s a pity — they are a must-have for the ultralight Greenimalist. They can be built from leftover scrap (cardboard and aluminum) and they use free sunlight as fuel. Panel-style cookers also fold well for easy traveling. What’s more, solar cookers work off-grid, making them useful in campgrounds and homesteads.

One final note: solar cooker operators should wear sunglasses to protect themselves from UV damage. All those concentrating beams aren’t so good for your eyes when you stare at them directly. Then again, wearing a stylish pair of shades might not be such a bad thing, especially if corrugated cardboard and aluminum foil isn’t your idea of green chic.

Photo credits: Tom Sponheim, public domain. Tom Sponheim, CC BY-SA. Tom Sponheim, public domain. Xuaxo, CC BY-SA. rangorang, CC BY-NC-ND. Meganhelms, CC BY-SA.

Why Abortion Isn’t Green

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A friend once asked me, “Why are you an environmentalist?” In essence, he was asking me why I cared so much. Of all the issues to be passionate about in life, why the environment?

I wasn’t sure how to answer him at first. I could have replied with any one of a hundred reasons. I thought about mentioning global warming, or cancer villages, or rainforest deforestation, or even oil spills. I had so many reasons that it felt impossible to answer the question with a single sentence.

But eventually, I decided to keep it simple. I told him that I was an environmentalist because I cared about protecting people.

In the end, I wasn’t an environmentalist because I cared that much about nature in itself. Preserving the earth’s ecosystems as its own end goal isn’t worth getting passionate about — but protecting people is.

Unfortunately, many environmentalists don’t share the same motivation. In their zeal to protect our planet’s beautiful ecosystems, they have forgotten the humane motivations behind their work. Instead of protecting people, they advocate that we kill them instead — in the form of abortion — to lower our environmental footprint (1).

They think that by having more children, we will only place greater pressure on the earth’s ecosystems. If we could only limit the birth rate, there would be fewer people alive to pollute, which would lower overall greenhouse gas emissions. Any method of population control, including killing the unborn, is a noble cause for the sake of the environment.

The Bible speaks so clearly against abortion that it leaves no room for debate. Even when a fetus is still in his mother’s womb, God considers him to be a human. As it says in one poem:

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. (Psalm 139:13-15)

From the moment of conception, we human beings bear the likeness of God’s image. Human life has sanctity — no one is allowed to arbitrarily take life away. As it says in the Bible: You shall not murder (Exodus 20:13). Terminating the life of another human, no matter how young or how small, regardless of the noble environmental intentions, is still murder.

The irony with abortion is that it doesn’t really solve any environmental crisis. In fact, we have many reasons to suspect that more abortions will simply increase our net environmental footprint.

The underlying root cause of environmental crises is overconsumption, not overpopulation. In the past, hundreds of millions of people inhabited planet earth without causing any of the environmental crises we face today. There were no problems with carbon emissions, landfills, e-waste, smog, or shrinking oil reserves. So clearly, these problems aren’t caused by overpopulation alone. It takes a short-sighted, modernized, Western culture to produce such catastrophes on a global scale.

A country’s population actually has very little to do with its levels of pollution. That’s because not all people pollute equally. The amount of pollution a person generates is roughly proportional to his wealth, since money represents control over natural resources. 80% of the world’s global income is controlled by the hands of 20% of the earth’s population. These wealthy 20%, located mostly in Western countries, are responsible for the vast majority of oil consumption, e-waste, and global warming. The remaining 80% of mankind survive on less than $10 each day; they are simply too poor to do much harm.

Ironically, it’s precisely those countries with low birth rates that are causing the most environmental damage. These nations tend to be wealthier and have stronger consumer cultures. Think of it like this: A single wealthy suburban American can produce more pollution than a hundred African slum-dwellers combined. The American lives in a McMansion, drives an SUV, takes cruise trips to Europe, eats fast food, and buys tablet computers. Slum-dwellers can’t really afford to do much besides buy food and water. And even when it comes down to basic essentials like water, we somehow manage to waste more per person as Americans than the rest of the world.

Fertility rate by country. Notice that the women in the Southern Hemisphere have lots of kids (3+ children per family) whereas women in the modern, Westernized nations in the Northern Hemisphere have far fewer children.

Carbon dioxide emissions per person per country. Notice that the most of our carbon emissions is coming from Western nations in the Northern Hemisphere.

Average daily water use per person by country. The average American uses around 10-30 times as much water as the average person from the Third World.

Encouraging a Westernized, child-free lifestyle, along with abortion, will probably make environmental crises worse. This is because families with children tend to pollute less per person than families without children. If a married couple has ten kids, they will be forced to spend most of their income on basic essentials like shelter, food, and clothing. Even if they wanted to pollute, they wouldn’t be able to afford to — they have too many mouths to feed. However, a married couple with dual-income and no kids will have plenty of extra cash. They’re more likely to buy sports car, SUVs, mansions with private swimming pools, round-the-world plane tickets, cruise vacations, and wide-screen TVs.

Clearly, what matters is not the absolute number of people on the planet, but our per person rate of pollution. This rate is determined by how much a society is influenced by our Western, consumer culture.

Sadly, most policymakers still think that murder by the millions is the appropriate solution. They’re even trying to export this atrocity to the developing world. Yet at the same time that we advocate abortion, we’re also advocating the American Dream.

We have seen this policy fail before. Since the 1970s, China has followed a one-child policy, which fines families for having two or more children. As expected, China’s population growth is slowing. However, its carbon footprint is growing exponentially. Within a few decades, it may even surpass the USA!

This child-free, consumer culture may also catch on in India. Yes, abortion would result in fewer people, but expect the total pollution to skyrocket. If more Indians start driving cars, eating fast food, and buying consumer electronics, pollution will rise even as the population remains stagnant.

Ultimately, there are two ways to view our planet earth:

On one hand, there are those believe that earth’s resources are scarce. Life is nothing more than an endless competition for limited natural resources like food, water, land, and oil. To survive, it is necessary to steal, attack, and kill. Unborn children aren’t human beings — they’re just competitors. So the less children we have, the greater our own share. Ultimately, this belief is either fueled by ignorance or by sheer greed.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that the earth has plenty. If society would only plan for sustainable development, there would be enough to share. Wise stewardship, not competition, would be the solution to our present environmental crises. If we only gave up consumerism, it would be possible to house, feed, and clothe all of earth’s billions of people.

There’s no false dilemma between caring for the environment and caring for humanity. They are one and the same. After all, that’s why I’m a Greenimalist — so that our future children can enjoy the earth for decades to come.

Abortion is murder, plain and simple. However, most environmentalists are willing to consider it. Grist, for example, consistently advocates this atrocity. These environmentalists forget that the reason we protect the environment is to protect people, which include the unborn.
Photo credits: tonrulkens, CC BY-SA. PlatypeanArchcow, public domain. Dbachmann, CC BY-SA. Date 360, United Nations Human Development Report 2006.

Why Don’t I Feel Rich?

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Two years ago, if you had told me that I was fabulously wealthy, I would have laughed. Hsinya and I were mired in student loan debt. As newlyweds, we struggled each month just to pay the rent. At times, we were forced to pay for our tuition and groceries using credit cards. We studied hard, avoided parties, and did our best to live frugally. Still, each year, we kept slinking further into debt. Secretly, I thought of myself as being poor—pity me.

Relatively speaking, I truly was poor when compared to my richer neighbors. My friends were really living it up during college. Their parents paid for their tuition, room, and board. My friends had money to buy expensive clothing, laptops, and cars. They dined out, went on cruises, and studied abroad in luxury. Naturally, I felt justified to consider myself poor.

But that’s the funny thing about living in America. By surrounding myself with other rich people, I got a distorted view of reality.

As I began to learn more about the world, I started to realize how fabulously wealthy I already was. I was not merely comfortable, nor well-to-do, nor even affluent–I was filthy rich. I had been envying others, when all along I had little appreciation for how wealthy I already was.

I never understood what true poverty was. In America, even our poorest citizens are extremely well-off. Someone working for minimum wage can earn around $15,000 per year. According to the Global Rich List, that places him in the top 15th percentile in terms of global wealth. Minimum wage might not sound like a lot, but it’s enough to rent an apartment, to buy food, to get basic healthcare, and to build savings.

But you and I, as tech-savvy minimalists, probably earn far more than minimum wage. Most of us have college degrees, which places us well above the top tenth percentile in terms of wealth. In fact, most middle-class Americans probably fall in the top 1st percentile of wealth. We are incredibly rich people.

If $8/hr is financially equivalent to fabulous riches, how then does the other 90% of the world survive?

As it turns out, two thirds of the world survives on less than $10/day (1). That paltry amount is supposed to pay for all their food, shelter, and clothing needs. I can’t imagine how anyone survives on such a meager income. I’ve had meals where the appetizer alone cost more than $10. Yet the rest of the world somehow manages to get by.

Consider this:

As we gripe about minimum wage in America, sweatshop workers in Costa Rica are gladly working for $1/hr. For such great pay, they’re willing to endure grueling conditions to manufacture the clothes that we wear.
As we enjoy our latest and greatest electronics, scavengers in India are collecting the obsolete computer parts we throw away. Our e-waste contains valuable metals that they salvage for scrap production. But first, they must burn off the impurities, which exposes them to hazardous mercury fumes on a daily basis.
Though we often complain about our food, refugees in Sudan don’t have any choice. Each day, they receive a daily ration of rice and beans, mostly donated through charities. Each entire meal costs only a few cents per person.
While America was complaining about rising gasoline prices in the Middle East, the poor in Tunisia were literally setting themselves on fire. In an effort to protest their poverty, they doused themselves with oil and burned themselves to death.

Poverty is very real. We’re only a plane-ticket away from seeing it firsthand.

My life has been amazing. I’ve never once worried about contracting malaria. I’ve never been homeless, nor have I ever feared starvation. For most of my life, I’ve struggled with the reverse problem: excess. As a child, I was morbidly obese. By the time I was 12 years old, I weighed over 215 pounds. I had too much to eat, not too little. I didn’t exercise because I could afford to drive everywhere. Instead of playing sports, I watched TV and played video games inside my enormous house.

I thought I was poor, but I had never seen real poverty. By most global standards, I was actually insanely rich; I just didn’t realize it.

Suddenly, I remembered what Jesus taught.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21)

This passage does not apply only to those whom we perceive to be rich. It speaks to every Christian in the Western World; we are incredibly rich people. Being rich isn’t a sin, but being ungrateful is. We ought to put our excess money for God’s purposes—for charity, for preaching the Bible, for reaching lost souls, for encouraging the persecuted church. But all too often, we are secretly dissatisfied with the material riches that we have received. Judging by the way we whine about our money, it’s clear our hearts aren’t set on heaven—we’re still stuck on acquiring more earthly treasures.

Each day, I’m presented with two choices.

On one hand, I can ignore what I’ve learned and return to a normal life filled with ungratefulness and envy. After all, thinking about real poverty and true heavenly riches is a tremendous emotional burden. I’d rather just whine about my low salary and the high cost of taxes.

On the other hand, I can be honest with myself. I have been blessed with so many material riches from my heavenly Father. Am I using them for the sake of the Kingdom of God?

According to Global Issues, 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day, and almost half the world—over three billion people—live on less than $2.50 a day.
Photo by GlacierTim, CC BY-NC.