Great, short editorial in the NYT about the clean cookstove initiatives.

Here is a shocking statistic: nearly two million people — mostly women and children — in the developing world die annually from illnesses brought on by breathing toxic smoke from indoor cooking stoves. The Obama administration is rightly doing something about it.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a global partnership aimed at providing 100 million clean-burning stoves to villages in Africa, Asia and South America. That would cover about one-fifth of the 500 million poor families that burn wood, crop waste, coal, even dung, for cooking and heating.

The United States will provide $50 million in seed money to the project, known as the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Other countries and private organizations have pledged a mere $10 million to the cause. But, as Mrs. Clinton noted, “we have to start somewhere,” and Washington will, and must, press for more.

Researchers have long known of the risks of primitive indoor stoves — including pneumonia in children, lung cancer, pulmonary and cardiovascular disease. They have also known that these stoves contribute to global warming by producing large quantities of fine-particle soot normally associated with diesel engines and burning down forests.

The replacement stoves are relatively small, simple cylindrical devices costing less than $100 and capable of capturing between half and 95 percent of the harmful emissions. The program will sensibly not use the money to buy and ship stoves but, rather, to create small manufacturing companies close to the target populations — creating new jobs in the process. This is an ingenious and overdue response to a global problem.