[Stoves] Prakti two-burner stove features in article on "protecting the poor from climate change policies"

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Ron

Unfortunately there is so little in your comment that is not ad hominem attacks you have given me very little to which I can respond. I will therefore mostly expand on my earlier post.

You earlier wrote that you did not “believe anything I said below…”. We are all, in the stove development community, fortunate that nothing we do depends on what you believe. 

What is clear, both from your response and Dean’s before it, is that you do not understand the issue I highlighted nor the threats to the world of stove improvement and dissemination. That is unfortunate as I have tried many times to offer direction and advice that will enhance the understanding of risks within the stove community, such as there is an identifiable community.

As you correctly pointed out I made no statement in support or rejection of either the article, the author’s POV, the source documents or the website you love to vigorously hate. There is no need to infer any POV. I was only bringing to everyone’s attention the fact that there are very large players involved in the political, climate and energy wars and they are starting to take notice of the improved stove development community, its project successes, failures and intentions.

We collectively consider that the intentions of the stove community are to improve the lives of those who cook with solid fuels and reduce their exposure to the products of imperfect combustion, as well as to relieve them of at least some of the workload involved in keeping the stoves fuelled.

Other organisations and forces are much larger than the stove community and far more influential. They have bigger budgets and are playing for far larger stakes. They don’t care at all what Ronal or Dean or Crispin think, whether we are satans or saints. What they care about is ‘winning’. The stove community can easily become a pawn in a much larger game. 

The attention that the publicity being generated now brings is not going to stop at the cute and cuddly intentions of well-meaning garage mechanics and their cooperating supporters. Once they start to look into the ‘deals’ offered by the stove community, they will take sides. The ‘deals’ are the claims of performance and benefit.

Whether or not you admire the Cornwall Alliance (about which I know nothing), it matters a lot if they decide to attack, as the editor of Nature did, the entire stove community and its programmes as a waste of time and money. The fact that such an attack made it to the hallowed pages of Nature (and other journals) is evidence enough that they are taking notice. The attention could just as easily have come from another quarter and contained exactly the same sentiments. We are vulnerable.

We can write protests of innocence and purity of motive to the Editor in the hope that they will give equal space to dissenting views. The record on that at Nature is not encouraging but we will try.

The point of the link I sent and the message content was to try to bring into sharp focus the reality that once one side or another, whether religious, agnostic, alarmist, realist, skeptical, utopian or luke-warm, discovers that the stove community is inviting people to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting stoves that have been selected using unvalidated ‘popular’ performance evaluation methods and standards containing, in part, worthless metrics, they will react opportunistically. They will quickly find that these methods:

 

-          Have never been externally reviewed for precision or certified valid for any purpose

-          Are widely known not to predict stove performance in use, but money is changing hands based upon their outputs (an ISO Working Group has even been established in an attempt to investigate this failure)

-          Generate ratings with a low confidence index (high variability)

-          Identify, as superior, stoves that are frequently rejected by end users for their failure to achieve the claimed benefits

-          Are methods that have been rejected by multiple implementing organisations as ‘useless’, ‘worthless’, ‘culturally irrelevant’, ‘[isn’t] a serious testing protocol’ and giving ‘irreproducible results’ 

-          Make claims for precision far beyond their actual capabilities

-          Have been dissected in articles and found wanting from a mathematical and conceptual point of view (i.e. Zhang et al, 2014)

 

Further, evidence based field assessments show that stoves rated as ‘good’ by these methods are frequently rejected by the end users or provide  <http://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/cooking-stoves-indoor-air-pollution-and-respiratory-health-india> ‘little improvement in smoke exposure’ or provided little  <http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACM099.pdf> benefit at all after considerable programme expense. Such programmatic failures have led organisations like USAID (2008) to abandon the field of improved stove.

 

Be assured, once one of these big players – any of them - discovers that almost the entire world of ‘improved stoves’ is based on ‘hippie science’ and ‘thumb-suck’ suppositions with unsupportable assertions of validity and appropriateness, that it is beset by institutional politics and rivalry and swayed by ideological views on poverty, energy, access, climate, power relationships and business preferences, they will pounce. 

 

We could easily be caricatured as no-nothing pretenders, based on the numerous failures to date, the inadequacy of our popular and plainly unscientific methods used to date by mainstream initiatives in the West. And that says nothing about our frequent social science failures to intelligently match products to people. I am trying very hard to prevent that. So are several others who realise the programmatic risks we face. 

 

In this David and Goliath situation and if we are not willing to get our own scientific house in order, they will simply halt everything in the sector until a new set of people and organisations create the worthwhile and necessary tools needed to run this thing properly. The Editorialist given a platform by Nature proposes the elimination of the entire improved biomass stove sector and its replacement by a massive LPG programme like the successful one in Indonesia. 

 

If political opportunists, for their own reasons, decide to take down the entire US-led stove initiative for no reason other than to score points, it will happen in a flash if it serves their short-run goals. They will only have to point to the conflict-ridden and distracted stove community (in part evidenced by your responses) and the unscientific approaches applied (as evidenced by the methods in popular use up as far as the UNFCCC) as evidence of a need for their immediate intervention.  As an un-aligned, independent, senior scientist from Los Alamos National Lab rudely observed, the stove community is a ‘cluster-f**k’.

 

The resistance to conducting a proper scientific review of methods, enshrined in the IWA, is appalling, approaching the suicidal. In no other publicly funded sector can one attempt to spend $100,000,000 without using a validated set of definitions, metrics or method of technology rating and selection. We do not want any stove programme receiving a  <http://www.taxpayer.net/library/article/golden-fleece-award#Past Golden Fleece Recipients> Golden Fleece Award. No amount of arm-waving about haste and need overrides these fundamental prerequisites. Do you realise how substituting politics for science exposes us to accusations of incompetence? 

 

Deriding, insulting, lampooning and marginalising the messenger is not going to delay the inevitable for a single day. That sort of behaviour only confirms the opinion that we are incompetent, that we cannot close ranks nor do valid science together. 

 

We can and must do better than that. 

 

Sincerely

Crispin

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