WORLDWIDE some 2.4 billion people cook on traditional stoves that burn wood, crop residues or dung, and each year the fumes from such stoves kill 1.6 million people (快猫短视频, 6 December 2003, p 22). According to estimates by the UN Development Programme, anyone regularly cooking on these stoves ends up inhaling as large a quantity of toxic chemicals as if they smoked two packets of cigarettes a day.
Gareth Thomas, the minister at the Department for International Development (DFID), tells me that his department is well aware of the problem of smoke inhalation. It set out its plans for tackling the problem in its August 2002 policy document Energy for the Poor, and works on this problem through international networks promoting ideas and stimulating debate. It also investigates stove technologies and the sort of changes in people鈥檚 behaviour that will allow women and children to avoid exposure to indoor smoke.
The DFID has also been prominent in the setting up of two international networks. The Global Village Energy Partnership aims to improve access to energy services. And the European Union鈥檚 Energy Initiative for Poverty Eradication and Sustainable Development promotes the role of affordable, sustainable energy services.
Advertisement
As part of its China programme, the DFID supports the environmentally sustainable and efficient use of locally available sources of fuel, and works to reduce associated health hazards and improve people鈥檚 livelihoods, the minister tells me. In this, the department co-finances a major project on indoor pollution managed by the World Bank.
Thomas is to be admired as the sort of minister who is prepared to travel far afield. He will have seen for himself the dreadful problems that smoke inhalation brings.
A LONE protester has derailed the UK鈥檚 nuclear weapons research programme, according to 快猫短视频 (28 February, p 4). Faced with legal action brought by a local peace campaigner, Janet Wick, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire has delayed its plans for a laser project called Orion, designed to reproduce the sorts of temperatures and pressures that occur at the heart of nuclear explosions. Its declared purpose is to ensure the safety of nuclear warheads carried by the UK鈥檚 Trident submarines.
Lord Bach, the minister for defence procurement, tells me that the government has not abandoned the laser project. The local district council had raised no objection to the original proposal, he says. The objections centre on the contention that planning rules require an environmental impact statement to have been submitted with the original proposal. The Ministry of Defence and the district council contest this, but 鈥渋n a spirit of openness鈥� the MoD will re-submit the proposal with supporting environmental information.
So be it, but I think that such weaponry is about as relevant to the UK鈥檚 defence needs in the 21st century as a fleet of dreadnoughts.
