PE’s Kayje Booker Speaks at Conference on Carbon Trading
Kayje Booker, Advisory Council member of Potential Energy, presented at the Practitioners Workshop on Enhancing the Usability of Clean Development Mechanism Methodologies for Household Energy Supply, hosted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn, Germany.
Booker spoke about the PE’s partner, LBNL’s involvement with World Vision’s Ethiopia Cookstoves Project. LBNL will contribute at least 1500 stoves to the project using funding from the carbon market established under the Kyoto Protocol. If successful, this project will be one of the first cookstove projects to navigate the CDM process and generate Certified Emissions Reductions which can be sold to governments and industries that are legally bound to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. With initial funding from a private donor, the project will distribute (at a subsidized price) enough cookstoves to create over 100,000 carbon credits. Profits from the sale of these credits will be shared between the initial investor, World Vision, and the communities where the stoves are distributed. By demonstrating that cookstove carbon projects can be profitable, the project participants hope to attract private investment to these kinds of projects that both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide health and environmental benefits to poor communities.
The goal of the Practitioner’s Workshop’s was to better understand and increase the use of cookstoves as both a development tool and fuel efficient technology. Booker was invited by along with other developers, academics, engineers, businessmen, carbon trading organizations, and non-governmental organizations involved in every aspect of cookstove development and distribution to provide feedback on the difficulties encountered by cookstove projects attempting to use the CDM.
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a part of the Kyoto Protocol aimed at decreasing greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. Despite the fact that fuel-efficient cookstoves meet CDM’s twin goals of climate change mitigation and sustainable development, only one cookstove project has been registered. The aim of the conference was to better understand the functioning and potential of such cookstoves and increase the number of cookstoves registered and distributed.
