Interesting point, but I wonder how such a change would come about when people often can’t afford an alternative?
Let there be clean light: Kerosene lamps spew black carbon, should be replaced, study says
By Sarah Yang, Media Relations BERKELEY —
The primary source of light for more than a billion people in developing nations is also churning out black carbon at levels previously overlooked in greenhouse gas estimates, according to a new study led by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois.
Results from field and lab tests found that 7 to 9 percent of the kerosene in wick lamps — used for light in 250-300 million households without electricity — is converted to black carbon when burned. In comparison, only half of 1 percent of the emissions from burning wood is converted to black carbon.
Factoring in the new study results leads to a twentyfold increase in estimates of black carbon emissions from kerosene-fueled lighting.
The previous estimates come from established databases used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others. One kilogram of black carbon, a byproduct of incomplete combustion and an important greenhouse gas, produces as much warming in a month as 700 kilograms of carbon dioxide does over 100 years, the authors said.
“The orange glow in flames comes from black carbon, so the brighter the glow, the more black carbon is being made,” said study principal investigator Tami Bond, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “If it’s not burned away, it goes into the atmosphere.”
The findings, published online this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, are coming out at the same time that the United Nations Climate Change Conference kicks off in Doha, Qatar. While officials from around the world are seeking effective policies and guidelines for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the study authors note that the simple act of replacing kerosene lamps could pack a wallop toward that effort.
“There are no magic bullets that will solve all of our greenhouse gas problems, but replacing kerosene lamps is low-hanging fruit, and we don’t have many examples of that in the climate world,” said study co-author Kirk Smith, professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and director of the Global Health and Environment Program. “There are many inexpensive, cleaner alternatives to kerosene lamps that are available now, and few if any barriers to switching to them.”
Smith pointed to lanterns with light-emitting diodes that can be powered by solar cells or even advanced cookstoves that generate electricity from the heat produced. Such technology, said Smith, is already available in developing countries.
The researchers used kerosene lamps purchased in Uganda and Peru and conducted field experiments there to measure the emissions. They repeated the tests in the lab using wicks of varying heights and materials, and kerosene purchased in the United States as well as in Uganda.
The study authors noted that converting to cleaner light sources would not only benefit the planet, it would help improve people’s health. A recent epidemiological study in Nepal led by Smith and other researchers at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, for example, found that women who reported use of kerosene lamps in the home had 9.4 times the rate of tuberculosis compared with those who did not use such lamps.
“Getting rid of kerosene lamps may seem like a small, inconsequential step to take, but when considering the collective impact of hundreds of millions of households, it’s a simple move that affects the planet,” said study lead author Nicholas Lam, a UC Berkeley graduate student in environmental health sciences.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, U.S. Agency for International Development and Environmental Protection Agency helped support this research.
Commenters who suggest building large power plants are somewhat missing the point: you would also need to establish a well-working state that can build, protect, and maintain an electric distribution system to all the far-flung settlements in their country. Sending a few solar panels and batteries to a village is far easier.
Even in the US we set up solar panels to power the occasional system that’s far off the grid, because it’s cheaper to do that than to run wires.
@MarkW:
Coleman makes lanterns that use LEDs & Batteries, Gasoline, Petroleum Naptha, and Kerosene. (Though the kerosene ones are getting harder to find). I own one of the Gasoline / Naphtha ones (Dual Fuel) and one of the Kerosene ones (bought this year for ’emergency kit’ as I’m converting to a safer fuel to store than Gasoline and that stores for a long time more easily).
I don’t have one of their LED “lanterns” as I use LED Maglights for battery driven use. I don’t have one of their Naphtha (or Coleman fuel) only lanterns as I want the ability to run on gasoline in an emergency and the Dual Fuel runs on naphtha for cleaner less smell use if desired.
And yes, a much simpler solution would be to buy everyone a mantle based lantern… (They are made by many folks other than Coleman). In particular, you could even get an Aladdin style kerosene LAMP that is pretty much like a regular kerosene lamp, but puts a mantle over a large circular wick. So lower ‘tech’ without any need to pump or have a pressurized fuel tank.
In case some folks have never heard of them, here’s their link:
http://www.aladdin-us.com/
I have one of them in the garage somewhere too.
But the warmistas are not interested in effective solutions… When you get to the issue of stoves, do a search on “rocket stoves” for that answer… Or look at:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/beer-cans-will-save-the-world/
BTW, thanks to recent massive price increases in electricity here in California, it’s cheaper to use my Coleman stove and cook on the patio that use my All Electric Kitchen. We’re going “3rd World” in order to save it….
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/camping-at-home-is-cheaper/
And yes, I’m WAY too interested in emergency lighting and cooking facilities… comes from having lived through a 7ish quake…
Re numerobis says: November 30, 2012 at 7:13 pm
I agree with your first point that a well-working state is needed for an electrical infrastructure. However, I must disagree with your second point for the rural USA that was electrified in the 1930s, decades before solar panels, through the Rural Electrification Administration. My father grew up without electricity in rural Oregon; he said the happiest day was when they could turn on light bulbs rather than light the kerosene and Aladdin lamps at night. Incidentally, the family did have a radio before the REA ran the wires out to the farm. The radio was powered for brief periods when they brought the car battery into the house.
andyb says:
November 29, 2012 at 1:38 pm
i + ii -> carbon taxes in developed world increase living standards in developing world, before considering effects on climate. (Unless you think the developing world is highly dependent on energy intensive imports from the developed world)
Andy
Sounds Keynsian to me. I’m with Hayek.
I forgot to add:
Well, having now read all the comments I see that Gail Combs (and others) beat me to it. Sorry to have been redundant…
@roger Knights:
Regular Coleman lanterns use Petroleum Naphtha. Or “white gas”. Basically gasoline without the fuel additives in it (like lead or alcohols). Coleman Fuel is a narrower ‘cut’ of naphtha with a more selected boiling point and exacting chemical structure (linear molecules ‘soot’ less and smell less than cyclic hydrocarbons).
While there ARE alcohol burning lamps, to the best of my knowledge, Coleman does not make one.
Coleman started out making a Kerosene (or related ‘coal oil’) lamp, then later added the Naphtha burners… then even later added gasoline burners (that have a gas ‘generator’ more immune to deposits from evaporating the gasoline – basically larger and hotter. The Kerosene lantern has a little ‘cup’ around the generator where you can start an open flame with alcohol to heat the generator externally. That’s pretty much the difference.)
This guy has an interesting video where he basically adds the cup to a dual fuel lantern generator and lets it run kerosene. ( I decided to pop the $100+ for the actual Coleman one, but that’s just me 😉
http://youtu.be/7BCO8brv4lg
Also, having used a LOT of candles and lamps and lanterns, I second the observations that the soot rapidly deposits on any surface nearby. Even the top of the chimney if it’s cool enough.
BTW, I also have a solar self charging emergency radio that has a built in LED lantern… so I’ve covered just about every possible 😉 It takes all day to charge to any significant degree and would not be very useful in constant rain, like we’re having now… but has a hand crank on it for then 😉
Gee…. I wonder if we can now ask all the “Feel Good Burn a Candle” for Gaia or whatever folks to stop “polluting” with their symbolic candle lighting?…
Oh, and I’ve got a couple of old Primus single mantle propane lanterns. Bought for about $15 IIRC some years back. Work great.
Final note: The use of Thorium in mantles has been phased out (at least in the USA) replaced with other similar but not radioactive elements from the same series. Light is a little less white and a touch more yellow / greenish depending on metal oxide used, but not enough to notice. Not that the amount of radiation in the mantle mattered…
Best thing to do for poor folks in the third world? Provide designs for things they can build for themselves, like the Rocket Stove, and help in advancing to modernity as fast as possible. For lighting, while the system in the Economist article is very nice and makes a lot of sense, it would be better to teach them how to make their own chimney lamps and mantel lanterns too…
Or even just bike generators and LED bulbs to put on their bike and a stand to hold it up while pedaling in place..
numerobis says:
November 30, 2012 at 7:13 pm
Commenters who suggest building large power plants are somewhat missing the point….
_______________________________
No we are not. Wind and solar are fine in niche markets. So are propane stoves and frigs (Checkout Lehmans nonelectric catalog)
However you had better lecture the World Bank about “suggesting building large power plants” because the World Bank is now lending out $4,270 million dollars for building COAL PLANTS in third world countries, up from $100 mil in 2005. graph and story
Ironically this is the SAME World bank whose new report shows a 4-5C increase per CO2 doubling and is being used to shove a Cap and Trade type bill through congress and the SAME World Bank whose employee was head of the IPCC and the SAME World Bank who was named in the leaked ‘Danish Text’ as handler of the carbon trading funds. Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after ‘Danish text’ leak: Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement…
Neil Jordan says:
November 30, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Re numerobis says: November 30, 2012 at 7:13 pm
I agree with your first point that a well-working state is needed for an electrical infrastructure. However, I must disagree with your second point for the rural USA that was electrified in the 1930s, decades before solar panels….
_______________________________________
Ah yes another Warmist LIE. Solar panels are not NEW technology.
From another history:
So modern solar technology has been around for over fifty years and the idea for well over 100 years.
bike generators and LED bulbs
Flash to a memory of Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green recharging the batteries on an exercise bike…. but his one bulb was tungsten.
@neil Jordan: I don’t see how we disagree. Electrification is great — the story above is just another way of putting it. Now, what’s the best way to electrify the rural countryside? In the 1930s with a strong central government, an excess of labour during the depression, and the technology of the day, the answer was to get the WPA to build dams and transmission lines. Today we have new technologies, the people this story (and others like it) talks about live in fragile states, and the people who would fund the work operate on charitable donations.
phlogiston says:
November 30, 2012 at 8:36 pm
Sounds Keynsian to me. I’m with Hayek.
He then follows up with the “fear the boom and the bust” video – which I normally show my econ students to discuss the many ways it distorts the views of the two men. (While the video creater see themselves as pro-hayek, they make him out to be an idiot.)
I could try to explain how what I said is not keynesian, that it is straight neo-classical economics – and right in line with Hayek’s views on the role of the price system in signalling information… but why don’t I just let Hayek explain it himself :
Re: Gail Combs says: December 1, 2012 at 12:31 am
Thank you for the historical background. I stand corrected. I should have known better, because my Weston exposure meter is ~60 years old, using the selenium cell you mentioned being developed in 1873.
Re: numerobis says: December 1, 2012 at 9:28 am
Given those economic constraints, I agree. I was thinking of rural electrification just starting with light bulbs, but the electricity was eventually put to work pumping water, separating cream, and washing clothes.
Hayak:
0:11 “We have to invent methods of making the Producer pay for all the indirect [1] damage he causes.”
0:21 “There are great problems of (short of, should?) limiting property rights available to the users who destroys resources is to count this in part of his cost of production.”
0:33 “One of the problems of our developing our rules of kind of law along with anything else, you can’t prevent (all of this?) by any government direction.
0:42: It may be that if the world becomes more and more crowded, the counting of total costs of further advance may turn out not to be worthwhile and the people with think, “Well, we’d rather stay where we are than having say the air is so polluted that it comes (unattractive?)”
1:05 “If you can (let me?) develop the right kind of legal framework where ever the producer really [2] pays for all the damage he’d done, then the people can choose.
1:17 “If something, because the producer has to compensate for all the damage, becomes so expensive that people are not willing want to pay the price, then we’ll stop it. [END]
[1] – Indirect damage? I cannot go there. Indirect is boundless. If we adopt that, then we should be able to sue the Chaos Theory South American butterfly for causing a hurricane. Leave it as direct, but disbursed damage and we can still talk — I’ll argue, but I’ll talk.
[1b] – Fair is fair. If you are going to hold producers to compensate for indirect damage, then society must also compensate producers for indirect benefits of their production. Just when should we stop rewarding Westinghouse and Tesla for the transformation of humanity via AC current technology. And why pick that point?
[1c] – Can I sue Nintendo for the indirect damage their products have done to my children’s school grades? (I said it was a boundless standard. But the theory of public nusiance might apply.)
[2] – There’s the rub. Hayak’s principle is there can be a “right kind of framework” where the producer will know ahead of time the real cost of damage he causes. This is a logical as well as a practical fallacy.
The logical fallacy is that no one can know the future price of any damage caused today. Let’s suppose there really is a CO2 tipping point at 532 ppm. How can a producer know what a price of a ton of CO2 is worth? The open market of course…. But how is the buyer of that liability to know? And the buyer, with a case of terminal prostrate cancer, has a different discount rate than do you.
The practical fallacy is that there could ever be a legal framework that would set —- and honor — an objective price that the producer could rely upon for his decision to produce.
Addendum:
Hayak -0:42: the people with think, “Well, we’d rather stay where we are
INDIVIDUALS can think, “I’d rather stay where I am.”
How can PEOPLE think that? This is a rather frightening thought from someone who is a defender of classical liberalism.
Can 51% of a population who want to “stay where there are” really control the other 49% to stay where they are? Should any majority EVER have that power over a minority?
If the minority are felons, I suppose so. Is that what it will take? To cast those who actively disagree with a majority as felons?
I have read the report at the link here ( given in the post above) – http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/11/28/kerosene-lamps-black-carbon/
and it does not say “. One kilogram of black carbon, a byproduct of incomplete combustion and an important greenhouse gas, produces as much warming in a month as 700 kilograms of carbon dioxide does over 100 years, the authors said.”
It reads today as ” One kilogram of black carbon, a byproduct of incomplete combustion, produces as much warming in a month as 700 kilograms of carbon dioxide does over 100 years, the authors said.”
So have they edited out “… and an important greenhouse gas, ..”?
Perhaps I missed discussion over this discrepancy ?
jimshu says:
December 1, 2012 at 3:33 pm
I have read the report…
____________________________
Editing after the fact gets done and WUWT is watched closely. Whether this is the case in this instance I do not know. Perhaps someone else may have noticed.
Michael Tremblay says:
Wow, this report is filled with so many inaccurate observations it is difficult to know where to start.
Thank you. You are exactly correct but without the baloney, there would be no scope for nice juicy articles on global warming. The kind that attract money to needy researchers in Berkeley.
Should the poor nations pay the wealthy nations to off-set the climate impact caused by this massive and inconsiderate form of energy use. They should be limited to the same number of kerosene lamps per person as the rich nations.
“””””…..John Marshall says:
November 30, 2012 at 2:30 am
”Primary source of light”? I thought the primary source of light was the sun……”””””
People need to watch their language; you never know who is reading your stuff.
Actually the ONLY source of “light”, is the human eye-brain system.
The sun is a principal source of energy in the form of electro-magnetic radiation. It just so happens that the human eye has evolved so as to be sensitive to the major portionof the radiant energy spectrum that the sun emits (fancy a co incidence like that )
The radiant energy from the sun is commonly measured in energy units like Joules, or power units like Watts, and a host of other measures well known to students.
The human eye/brain system, produces a psycho-physical response to that narrow spectral region in a single octave from about 400 to 800 nm wavelength; roughly 1.5 to 3.0 electron Volts photon energy. That response is represented in a completely different set of measurement units, that have evolved over long periods of ingenious experiments to determine what human eyes actually “see”.
The result is called “light”, and the psycho-physical equivalent of the Watts power rate of EM radiation is “lumens”. I’m not aware of any unit corresponding to energy in Joules, other than lumen seconds.
We get neither heat nor light from the sun. We make them both right here on earth, and light is all in our heads.
jimshu wrote: “So have they edited out ‘… and an important greenhouse gas, ..”‘
They definitely edited it.
Unfortunately, the previous version isn’t in google cache or yahoo cache. However, it is almost certainly in the browser cache of somebody here on WUWT.
If you viewed the story before they edited it, the you probably have a copy of the unedited version in your browser cache. To check whether you have a copy, do this:
1. Do not go to the page and view the new version! If you do that (as I foolishly did), you’ll replace the old copy in your browser cache with the new one.
Alternately, you can view the page using a different web browser. IE, FireFox, Chrome & Opera all use separate caches, so browsing with one browser won’t wipe out the cache entry kept by another browser.
2. Visit NirSoft.net, and download the appropriate “cache viewer” tool(s) for your web browser(s):
IECacheView (for Microsoft Internet Explorer)
ChromeCacheView (for Google Chrome)
MozillaCacheView (for FireFox & other Mozilla variants)
OperaCacheView (for Opera) (the Opera version is currently broken)
3. Then, using the appropriate cache viewer tool, ctrl-F (find) and enter the URL of interest:
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2012/11/28/kerosene-lamps-black-carbon/
Then select (click on) the file, and press F4 (File -> Copy selected files to) to save the cached file.
Then email a copy to me, and I’ll put it on my web server. 🙂
My email address is here:
http://www.sealevel.info/email/
UC Berkley actually edited their article is several places, to eliminate all the embarrassing references to black carbon as a greenhouse gas.
Here are a few copies of the entire original version:
http://www.webcitation.org/6Cbi1U76a
http://www.webcitation.org/6CbgNO81e
http://www.webcitation.org/6Cbj7L2U6
http://pages.citebite.com/p7r9f2p9kptw
Also, the health.universityofcalifornia.edu site has most of the original version; saved here:
http://www.webcitation.org/6CbgpN566
and here:
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/Let_there_be_clean_light–UC_Health.htm
Google and Yahoo also find more copies.
What’s the point of tracking down the original wrong press release?
To provide a record of the un-acknowledged editing out of that basic blunder. Since much of the above thread discusses that edited-out error, a critic could then read this report and thread and point to this site as discussing something that could appear to have been made up by Anthony, as the error no longer is in the referenced-to report.
Oh, and to evidence how wrong the original report is.
Dave Burton, Thank you for finding the unacknowledged editing. I have seen it happen a number of times on several different topics. It is often used as proof that the critic is a LIAR when in fact he is not. jimshu is correct.
Thanks, Gail & Jim. Another motivation for documenting their slight of hand, numerobis, is the pure, sweet, simple joy of ridiculing the Left Coast libs at UC Berkley. 😉