Michael Shepard on Exposure to Cooking Smoke and Solutions

This episode features a conversation with Michael Shepard, a longstanding friend and colleague I worked with many years ago at Rocky Mountain Institute. For many years, Michael headed up E Source, a spinoff of the Institute that has had a global impact.Now Michael is devoting his time to raising awareness about a huge and largely invisible environmental problem… exposure to cooking smoke. Some 4 billion global citizens rely on primitive, “stone age,” cooking techniques with many health, ecological, and social problems… costing our society trillions of dollars each year.There is a solution:  A model developed in Africa is based on gasification of wood pellets for basic, but clean burning cookstoves. The highly efficient stoves require far less fuel, and hold great promise. Michael is now raising awareness and money to take this problem head on.