The United States could offset its own carbon-dioxide pollution by investing in clean technology in developing countries and providing them with green solutions to fulfill basic needs, says award-winning scientist Ashok Gadgil.

Gadgil, senior staff scientist at the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, has taken on the mission of finding cost-effective solutions to ease the effects of global warming and improve the quality of life in poor countries.

Gadgil, who earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1979, is known for creating radically simple inventions to solve fundamental problems in Third World countries, including developing a machine that inexpensively cleans drinking water.

In 2005, Gadgil co-authored a paper outlining a hypothetical plan to provide clean, efficient energy to 1 billion people. The International Energy Agency estimates that 1.6 billion people, or more than 25 percent of the world’s population, live without electricity.

In the paper, Gadgil proposed that wealthy countries cover the cost of developing countries’ moving from old, inefficient technology to new, cleaner methods of delivering electricity. Wealthier nations would be compensated for their investment by earning carbon credits to offset their greenhouse-gas emissions.

Carbon credits provide a way to reduce greenhouse emissions on an industrial scale by capping total annual emissions and letting the market assign a monetary value to any shortfall through trading.

Credits can be used to finance carbon-reduction schemes between trading partners and around the world.

On a very simple level, it would be like footing the bill to switch from an incandescent light bulb to a energy-saving compact fluorescent, or replacing coal-powered electricity with wind or solar.

“We could use it as a way to reduce our carbon emissions,” Gadgil said. “This is not charity; this is self-interest.”

This is just a small facet of the future of a free-market system of buying and selling emissions credits to determine the amount of pollutants a company could emit, said Gadgil, in a speech Oct. 11 in the Energy and Environment lecture series at Brown University.

“The financial flows of carbon trading will be larger than what we are experiencing today in our international flow of capital,” he said.

Greenhouse gases, no matter where they are produced, are a worldwide problem. Sulfur dioxide from China is already showering acid rain on Japanese forests, and pollution particles have even showed up on the U.S. Pacific Coast.

When asked how China and other emerging industrial nations can sustain economic growth while also creating clean, energy resources when a wealthy country such as the United States has had problems, Gadgil said existing infrastructure and aesthetic concerns (such as battles over wind farms) have blocked U.S. progress.

In Gadgil’s native India, for example, the government could start nearly from scratch by combining cutting-edge energy technology and capital from wealthier developed nations.

GADGIL HAS a history of taking on taking on daunting tasks — alleviating grave problems for populations with few resources by finding the “soft spot” and attacking it.

His efforts have yielded simple yet sophisticated designs that function efficiently in environments with limited access to power and tools for repair. Lack of resources has required Gadgil to examine every angle of an invention repeatedly, considering such obstacles as affordability, durability and efficacy.

His first noteworthy invention, “UV Waterworks,” came about when he took a personal interest in finding an inexpensive way to clean water during the 1993 outbreak of cholera in West Bengal, India.

The machine resembled a small tanning bed and used ultraviolet light to clean drinking water of biological pathogens. The electricity bill for the year was $14.

The invention serves a half-million people a year, a number that continues to grow.

WaterHealth International, the company created to provide the service, charges two-tenths of a cent per liter to clean drinking water.

Gadgil also invented the Darfur-Berkeley stove in 2004 after the U.S. Agency for International Development called him seeking ideas to help Darfur refugees in Sudan get better fuel efficiency from their cooking stoves. The refugees, mostly women and children, were risking attack from soldiers when they scavenged for wood.

The agency originally asked Gadgil whether sun-dried kitchen waste could be used as cooking fuel for 2.2 million Darfur refugees living in desert camps. Gadgil quickly dismissed the idea of using kitchen waste, but decided to take on the issue of developing a more efficient stove after learning that the refugees were cooking on three-stone fires — built within a triangle of supporting stones — which was highly inefficient.

“That was the ‘soft spot’ that was on the chain of causation that was leading to rape and mutilation,” Gadgil realized.

After months of testing and development with a group of students at the University of California at Berkeley, the Berkeley-Darfur stove was born. The lightweight metal stove, the size of a large pot, used 75-percent less wood, avoiding hundreds of hours scavenging and exposure to attacks, and produced much less carbon dioxide.

For the invention, Gadgil and his colleague, Christina Galitsky, received a “Breakthrough Award” in innovation from Popular Mechanics magazine two weeks ago.

ngarcia@projo.com