More American tax dollars are going up in smoke, as the combination of “global warming concerns” and “air quality issues” give the government an excuse to spend millions on cookstove research.

As an extra bonus: The air quality issues pertain to that in other countries.

Researchers at universities in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois and Minnesota will receive $9 million in grant funding. Researchers are evaluating the climate benefits of cleaner cooking methods. Traditional cookstoves are a major source of black carbon, an air pollutant that not only has serious human health impacts, but also affects climate, including increased temperatures, accelerated ice and snow melt and changes in the pattern and intensity of precipitation.

This Science to Achieve Results (STAR) funded research will focus on measuring and communicating the benefits of adopting cleaner cooking, heating, and lighting practices.

Grants were awarded to the following universities:

· $1,495,454 to University of California, Berkeley, Calif. – will explore the relationship between household and village-scale pollution to understand the effectiveness of cookstove interventions.

· $1,500,000 to University of Colorado Boulder, Colo. will use small, inexpensive sensors to better monitor human exposure to residential burning pollution. They will also collect data through health assessments and outdoor air quality measurements in Ghana.

· $1,500,000 to Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colo. – will use cookstove interventions in China, India, Kenya, and Honduras to explore the emissions, chemistry, and movement of indoor cookstove smoke, as well as conduct health assessments and model exposures to improve understanding of climatic impacts of stove interventions.

· $1,499,998 to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ill. – will investigate how local resources affect community acceptance of heating stove interventions, and how measurements will help understand air quality and climatic benefits of cookstove interventions in Alaska, Nepal, Mongolia, and China.

· $1,489,388 to University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. – will measure changes in air quality and health outcomes from cleaner cooking and heating technologies and will conduct modeling to assess regional weather, air quality impacts, human exposure and health impacts of a rural cookstove intervention in China.

· $1,499,985 to Yale University, New Haven, Conn. – will use socioeconomic analyses, emissions and pollution measurements, and global climate modeling to investigate the impacts of cookstove interventions in India.