Delegates will be meeting in Copenhagen this week as parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change try to reach agreement on reducing the pollution that is cooking the planet. In the thicket of carbon offset formulas and political calculations, a team of officials from the National Institutes of Health and the Lancet, a British medical journal, has a message: The ultimate issue is health.

This team recently published a series of reports on the beneficial health effects of reducing greenhouse gases. The series is a reminder to delegates of the human consequences of public policy decisions and why it is so important to gauge the health impacts of considered strategies. Moreover, although most public discussion is of sacrifice and forbearance, there are some very real, daily benefits to be had on the way to averting global disaster. After all, aren't we talking about improving people's lives, now and in the future, by ending destructive practices?

One report, “Public Health Benefits of Strategies to Reduce Greenhouse-Gas Emissions: Household Energy,” studied the case for efficient cookstoves in India. More than half the world's population, or over 3 billion people, burns fuel indoors to cook and heat their homes. The indoor air pollution from this practice kills 1.5 million people a year, 85 percent of whom are women and children. The fires also contribute to a smoggy plume known as the Atmospheric Brown Cloud that is purported to be trapping heat in the atmosphere.

The Lancet report examined what would happen if 150 million low-emission stoves were put in use over a 10-year period. Their conclusion: “National programmes offering low-emission stove technology for burning local biomass fuels in poor countries could, over time, avert millions of premature deaths, and constitute one of the strongest and most cost-effective climate-health linkages. 

“Indoor air pollution from inefficient cookstoves increases the risk of acute respiratory tract infections in children younger than 5 years and chronic respiratory and heart disease in adults older than 30 years. Globally, almost 1 million children are currently dying every year of respiratory infections induced or exacerbated by the inefficient burning of solid fuels. By 2020, the cumulative effect of the proposed Indian  stove programme would be to lower the national burden of the three diseases mentioned above by about a sixth. This would be equivalent to elimination of nearly half the  country's entire cancer burden."

The authors state that approximately 240,000 children and approximately 1.8 million adults would be saved from premature death by the end of a program that would bring high efficiency stoves to 87 percent of the population by 2020. In addition, approximately 0.5 to 1.0 billion tons of C02 equivalent would be eliminated from the atmosphere.

If these projections are correct, they show clear and dramatic benefits from a low-tech solution to a widespread problem. If all the stoves distributed over 10 years were subsidized at $20 a piece this program would cost $3 billion, roughly equivalent to what the U.S. military had spent directly every 10 days in Iraq as of August 2008, according to the Congressional Research Service. By my calculations, that's $14,705 per saved person and is, perhaps, the best two-for-one public policy deal of the decade. If you could help avert long-term disaster and reduce short-term disability at the same time for that kind of money, wouldn't you do it? It is certainly a question for the leaders now in Copenhagen.

There is one company in Fort Collins, Colo., however, that is not waiting for an answer. Envirofit International has already developed a highly-efficient stove (shown above) and sold, not given away, 100,000 units to people in southern India. The company sells several models of stoves and attachments for between 699  and 2699 Indian rupees. That's about $15-$58. This income is used to develop and expand its businesses, while product development and early commercialization is supported by grants and donations. The company also plans to benefit from trading in the carbon offset market. This business model supports 70 full-time employees around the world and about 500 distributors in India alone.

Envirofit was established as a U.S. tax-exempt corporation in 2004, and has a close working connection with Colorado State University's Engine and Energy Conversion Lab. It is one of the innovative social entrepreneurial organizations serving the “base of the pyramid” customers of the world, those 3 billion who make less than $2 a day.