[Stoves] NY Times article on what fuel poor need. (Ronal W. Larson)

Ronal W. Larson rongretlarson at comcast.net
Fri Dec 6 16:29:46 CST 2013


Yury  - good to hear from you.  
     To others,  Dr. Yury (Yudkevich) and I met at the first stove conference coordinated by AD and Priya Karve in Pune India in 2000 - about 5 years after this list got started.  Yury has enormous knowledge on making char - boxcar sized container containing 8-10 large retorts each helping firing others).  The following certainly involved some Google translations.  See Yury’s website at:  http://bioenergy-spb.narod.ru/

   Inserts below


On Dec 6, 2013, at 12:43 AM, yury yud <yudyury at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Dear Ron,
> I want to express my views on this debate .
> 1. Global warming as a result of human activity :
> Take statistics and calculate how much carbon can be thrown into the air , if we burn all the coal , gas and oil ( actually part of the fuel used in chemical synthesis ) . It turned out 10 billion tons of carbon .
     [RWL:  Yury -  Something wrong here.  We are now emitting about this amount every year.  We have gone from about 280 ppm to 400 ppm - about 40%.  We are now over 800 giga tons C in the atmosphere - with additions going into atmosphere and ocean at about an 8/800 = 1% annual amount total.    
  
> Look how much carbon is in the form of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans . Turned 100,000 billion tons. We could increase that number by 1/10000 maximum .
    [RWL:  It is not the whole ocean number that is important - it is the surface part of the ocean.  That is in rough balance with the atmosphere and is up by about the same 40%.  Our moving towards acidification is a very important reason for pushing char-making stoves.  Ocean species are already disappearing.


> People too ambitious a high opinion of themselves, if they think they can influence global processes of their daily activities.
    [RWL:  Not understood.  We need both private and public (governmental) action - with the latter more apt to happen with a push from those taking private action.

> The high concentration of population and industry can lead to local issues in such regions . Reducing emissions is crucial there.
    [RWL:  Agreed.  But also needed everywhere.

> 2 . One person dies of hunger every six seconds in the world. I think the use of food as fuel immoral today.
   [RWL:  Agreed  (haven’t checked your death statistic but sounds right).  Since this is part of a thread on liquid fuels for cooking, where I was advocating liquid fuels from biomass - let me emphasize the same thing as Yury - that future liquid fuel for cooking should not be from crops that are also food  (mainly corn and soy).  Sugar cane in Brazil seems to have less objections - a high energy return on energy invested (EROEI).  The rationale for liquid fuels is mainly one of health.
    But I have in mind a liquid fuel coming from pyrolysis.  The more of that, the more char and the better we can have carbon negativity (the topic of the upper part of this message).  The fuel for that can be miscanthus, willow, switchgrass, agave, etc - that have no impact on fuel supplies.  But even ethanol (or other fuel) from corn can be quite acceptable if the fuel is the non-edible parts of the corn plant.   That can be via digestion or pyrolysis - and I am betting on the latter as being eventually the better choice.  So getting us started on renewable fuels (including for cooking) from edible materials is not all bad.  But we do have to switch over - as I am sure Yury is arguing the same.

   Dr.  Yury - good to hear from you. 

 Ron

>  Sincerely
> Yury (Russia)
> yudyury at gmail.com

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