EPA=Leftists with money and time on their hands.

US EPA will now develop new standards for cooking stoves... in Darfur. Because people are dying from indoor soot pollution. Just not in America.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy is set to unveil on Tuesday six federal grants to universities to fund research on clean cookstove technology.

The announcement will put the EPA's resources squarely behind a United Nations' quest for cleaner burning stoves and an end to deadly cooking pollution.

"This research will help to improve air quality, protect public health and slow climate change," the EPA said in explaining why the agency chief will preside over the announcement on Tuesday.

To make the case for why these grants are so important, EPA noted the World Health Organization estimates that exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open pit fires leads to 4.3 million premature deaths each year.

Over the years I've seen a lot of these "new" cook stove designs. Kids at design school come up with them all the time. Some of them are quite clever, being made out of tin cans and random stones, and can cleanly burn anything from newspaper to camel poo. An excellent and educational project to undertake as a design school student, and possibly even useful to poor bastards in the Third World too if done properly.

Of course solutions to this problem have been around FOREVER, since Greek and Roman times at least. The Egyptians had some kick-ass solutions too if I remember right. Here's one from Victorian times, the Kelley Kettle. You can make tea with dried grass if you want.

The one that can't be beat is called a chimney, of course. Anybody can arrange a chimney out of mud and rocks, if there's nothing else around. That they don't is an indication that the problem is not one of materials or time, but rather something else. Like a chimney tax/hearth tax, perennial favorite of grasping tyrants throughout history, or them getting raided by bandits, or debilitating disease, or general starvation, or something else you ain't going to fix with a fricking tin-can stove design.

For the US EPA to be getting involved in this re-invention of the wheel contest indicates deep penetration of spoiled, sophomoric Leftists into the middle and upper management structure of the agency. The effects can be reduced with a starvation budget but the really determined parasites will cling on to the bitter end, poisoning everything around them. Once you get an infestation like that, the only way to get rid of it is to raze the thing down to the ground.

Kill it with fire. Salt the ashes.

Or better yet, nuke it from orbit. "Its the only way to be sure."