Choosing the better of the evils

It is not enough to consciously be making effort to be ecologically sustainable in our homes without doing the same to our environment. Practicing sustainability in our homes without regard for the environment is a perfect recipe for disaster - like the one some parts of the world are currently experiencing. Let me fill you in; while the world is in a festive mood with respect to Christmas and the forthcoming new year, scores of people lost their lives to a climate-related disaster in parts of the United States.

As someone who is always pursuing ecological sustainability in everything, I am often torn between what is ecologically beneficial or sustainable but more expensive and what is cantankerous to the environment but available at a cheaper rate. I mean, I live in a third-world country where I try my best to survive on less than $4 per day with a family of 4, including myself. When asked about climate change and what he would do to tackle it, one of the leading candidates for the number 1 position in my country likened the phenomenon to preventing a church rat from eating poisoned holy communion.

Only a very few people understood the analogy, but it makes perfect sense. You simply cannot preach climate consciousness to people that are yet to know where their next meal would come from. Nevertheless, I personally try my best within the limit permissible to be environmentally conscious.

I recently changed apartments hurriedly because my landlord decided to jerk up the rent by almost 50%. Of course, a 50% increase is still fine compared to the increment rate that others within the neighborhood have to contend with. Since I've got a site that has been halfway developed, I borrowed money to develop it further and make it a bit habitable. We moved in a couple of weeks ago and have been gradually adapting to our new life since then.

But things have been difficult, to put it lightly. You can imagine a family struggling to survive before now having to pay debts from her meager income. Thus, being a new site, we have been forced to resort to using firewood to cook most of the time. Ordinarily, we have a gas cylinder and a burner that we use to cook. Recently the price of gas has more than doubled and keeping up has become a mission impossible. However, my conscience somehow bugs me whenever we cook using firewood.

The burning of firewood releases carbon dioxide and water vapor into the atmosphere in addition to particulate materials. The released gases constitute one of the major problems facing humanity - global warming and its associated climate change. The particulate materials constitute another type of environmental problem entirely. Even though the pollutants released from using firewood to cook by a family as small as mine may be small, it is the cumulative effects that count. If every family resorts to this method, perhaps the gravity of what I am trying to explain would be understood more.

But then, is cooking with fossil gas really a better option, or lemme say, a less evil option?

I have not really taken my time to analyze the two methods of cooking. The gas that we use to cook is largely made up of methane or a mixture of propane and butane. Whatever the constituents may be, all are hydrocarbons that burn in oxygen to produce the energy that we use for cooking while carbon dioxide and water are produced as by-products. Apart from these by-products, methane leakage also occurs in the activities leading to the supply and distribution of this cooking gas.

Methane may be less persistent in the environment than carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, it is much more powerful when it comes to global warming. According to a particular report, methane is actually 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in causing warming over a 100-year period. However, according to a particular finding published in FUTY Journal of the Environment, cooking gas has a lower emission rate compared to firewood when both were used to boil the same amount of water. In actual fact, firewood tends to emit 5x as much as cooking gas according to (Johnson and Tschudi, 2012. In another report, this time from the World Bank, the efficiency of cooking gas was estimated to be 60% while that of firewood was a paltry 20%.

Thus, barring the leakages to the environment, it appears cooking gas is the lesser of the evils. Another option would have been to cook with electricity but that would even be much more expensive and electricity generation has its own environmental issues.

All in all, it appears we are stuck with cooking with firewood for now, pending the time that things will pick up financially for us. As it stands, the better of the evils is the one that is least expensive.

What do you think?

NB: The image in this post is mine, taken using Samsun Galaxy Tab A (2016).