Will America Keep Its Promise of $50 Million for Clean Cookstoves?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has announced that the United States will contribute $50 million over five years to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a group planning to provide 100 million new cookstoves to poor families in Africa, Asia and South America. 

Every day, half the world’s families cook their food on wood, dung, and other biomass-burning open fires or traditional stoves that are inefficient and polluting. As a result, about 1.5 million people die prematurely each year—a life lost every 20 seconds.

Writing today for the New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal praises the initiative in Money for Stoves; the Other Pledges? She also raises a key question that is concerning all of us, one raised earlier this year by Bill Gates in AOC’s Is America Triple-Promising Global AID Dollars?

With all the problems in running America’s government, we are concerned that our public announcements about global aid may be just window-dressing, announcements that can be thwarted by individual congress people and political parties. Aid to women has always been a political target, with Republicans and Conservatives thwarting almost any program that didn’t stipulate some form of sexual abstinence and no birth control — even if the aid dollars are for cooking pots or a similarly innocuous and life-enhancing project.

At the end of yesterday’s conference of the Major Economies Forum in New York, US climate change envoy Todd Stern said he would prepare a full accounting of America’s promises to aid and actual delivery of the dollars.

With more Teaparty climate change naysayers gaining momentum with voters, America may not keep our commitments to environmental action until we agree as a country that climate change is a problem.

Hear US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking at the CGI