[Stoves] Venting smoke and heat (in response to Anand Karve)

[Traveller]

Dear Dr. Karve:

Thank you so very much for this telling example. I was afraid of this but
hadn't come across a specific instance.

"This is actually a very simple solution to air pollution as well as heat
in the kitchen, but the donor agency, for which this study was being done,
did not accept it, because this solution was equivalent to having a
chimney, which transfers the pollution from inside the kitchen to the
outside environment."

I am afraid your client is fooled by the cult of air pollution epidemiology
where emissions equate to pollution, no matter where and in what dosage.

A house of cards - of heroic assumptions and convoluted models, that is -
has been constructed to generate health damage from air pollution.

Pollution is, simply, an object in wrong place. In wrong place, people are
exposed to the object and may suffer illness. We don't really have much
knowledge about how different types of exposures - dose over a day or
persistently over years, even a lifetime - cause particular disease
incidence.  Humans have known for millennia that smoke - or some other
dangerous releases - are hazardous, and a general consensus has emerged
over the last 80-odd years on certain levels of exposures to certain kinds
of objects wafting in air are associated with certain patterns of disease
incidence.

In short, exposures make pollution. To say that putting pollutants outside
the home is no solution betrays studied, deliberate ignorance. These days
that takes certain expertise.

Transferring pollutants outdoors of course increases outdoor
concentrations. The question is tradeoffs due to differential exposures.

I remember an Agatha Christie (Poirot) tale about a year ago where she
narrates how the outside air is pretty dirty at night (some English town in
1920s, I suppose) because home fires are raised to face the winter nights.
Presumably it made sense to push the pollution out so people can sleep more
comfortably; back then, not many people were going to go out and trudge
through English snow and ice for hours at night.

Outdoor air quality varies by location and time. The incremental
contribution to that pollution load by household cooking may be trivial to
significant, but what matters is not the load but relative exposures.
Except in heavily polluted - due to industrial or transport fuel emissions
or chemical releases or open waste - and/or congested areas, I don't think
outdoor air quality can be severely compromised by ventilating cooking
smoke from small households. If the concentration levels 50-100 feet above
ground are increased but ground level concentrations not that much nor that
long, there is a prima facie case for lower exposures.

Chimneys and tall chimneys have a legitimate place in air quality
management. Emissions rate hysteria should be confined to USEPA.

------

This "emissions are pollution" hysteria is relatively new. Let me be bold
enough to assert that there is no specific quantitative basis for a general
claim that venting cooking smoke outdoors (chimney, or gap under the roof)
makes no difference in health impact.

If you see that Goldemberg, Reddy, Johansson, Williams piece in ESD circa
2004 about a global cooking initiative or something, ventilation was
clearly recognized as a near-term solution.

But now the new priesthood of purists, sitting in air-conditioned rooms
with filtered air (which, after all, does mean venting indoor air pollution
out), proclaims that chimneys are not a solution, that a sharp reduction in
high short-term exposures is not a good thing.

Ah, well. They can justify that claim by simply asserting - as USEPA and
the IHME gangs do or come close to it - that there is no evidence of a
"safe threshold".

Yeah, right. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Even so, USEPA recognizes that residential wood heaters use chimneys
<https://www.epa.gov/residential-wood-heaters/fact-sheet-summary-requirements-wood-fired-forced-air-furnaces>.
Why do they allow US homes to spew wood smoke outside the homes, instead of
killing the polluter first? :-)

I can imagine a defense - "We don't have a good dose-response curve
applicable to this particular population in this particular geography for
this particular fuel chemistry and combustion practice; in any case, we
don't have a good handle on outdoor air quality at different heights and
people's mobility. So we are going to assume that exposure inside at high
levels for short periods is no different from exposure outside at lower
levels for longer periods; we'd see the same pattern of disease incidence."

I wish such claims were explicitly made. Then the deceit would be exposed.

There is a fooling game going on. We don't have direct measurements of any
significance for the indoor fuels of the supposedly 3 billion people in
terms of fuel chemistry or combustion patterns. Fuel inventories are cooked
up, and so are fuel qualities and emission factors. To give us national
numbers for "emissions from cooking." (These fuels are used inside the
homes and outside, and also in/out non-residential structures as we all can
see if we bother to get out of Washington, DC offices.)

If that is deceit, add some more: exposures and dose-response curves. There
are practically no measurements of exposures; don't be fooled by the claims
that concentrations equate to exposures. (In any case, just where the
concentrations are measured and how, for whom, is another matter.) Whatever
the "dose", "response" is, well, cooked up. Via "integrated exposure
response" chicanery.

That is how we get "Global Burden of Disease".

Or Murder by Assumption.

Nice title for an Agatha Christie novel. Except that there is no mystery.
The evidence is all out there, in experts' own words.

Experts fly high and wide because they have very strong arms and hands. So
much experience in waving them.

Nikhil


---------
(India +91) 909 995 2080

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 10:11 AM, Anand Karve <adkarve at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Nikhil,
> this refers to fans for ventilating the kitchen. Some years ago our
> Institute conducted tests on air quality in rural kitchens in Maharashtra
> state.  In one particular village, most of the houses had a 10 cm gap
> between the roof and  the walls of the kitchen. In these kitchens, the air
> pollution level was always very low.  This is actually a very simple
> solution to air pollution as well as heat in the kitchen, but the donor
> agency, for which this study was being done, did not accept it, because
> this solution was equivalent to having a chimney, which transfers the
> pollution from inside the kitchen to the outside environment. Ceiling fans
> and wall mounted fans are generally shunned by the housewives because the
> air currents created by a fan disturb the flames in the stove.
> Yours
> A.D.Karve
>
> ***
> Dr. A.D. Karve
>
> Chairman, Samuchit Enviro Tech Pvt Ltd (www.samuchit.com)
>
> Trustee & Founder President, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI)
>
> On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 12:50 PM, Traveller <miata98 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Failed to post this earlier. I am soliciting opinion on the attached
>> report; can provide additional tables later. he
>> -------------
>>
>>> Nikhil Desai again.
>>>
>>> The Washington Post 16 August 2016 news item - By 2085, most cities
>>> could be too hot for the Summer Olympics
>>> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/08/16/by-2085-most-cities-could-be-too-hot-to-host-the-summer-olympics/?utm_term=.8cc19abaab69> got
>>> me thinking of  heat in the kitchen.
>>>
>>> In many poor people's homes around the world, the kitchen can at times
>>> get unbearably hot. I remember getting an electric fan placed in the
>>> kitchen was one of the first luxuries at my home (getting a radio and then
>>> a fan was the first; we already had electric light.)
>>>
>>> How likely is it that climate change, heat island effects, increasing
>>> population and building density, and outdoor air pollution will tax the
>>> health of the next two billion energy poor, over and above the supposed
>>> PM2.5 "premature mortality"?
>>>
>>> Are there diseases that are particularly susceptible to
>>> heat? Conversely, in linking air pollution to disease incidence, has the
>>> role of heat exposures been overlooked?
>>>
>>> We go on messing with pretend metrics of average emission rates and cook
>>> up exposures, disease, and death, for the sake of maintaining "consensus".
>>>
>>> Anil Rajvanshi had the brightest idea - rural restaurants and meal
>>> coupons for the poor.  With air-conditioning, I will add, for some parts of
>>> the world some times of the year.
>>>
>>> At least fans. I have seen such eateries grow throughout the world over
>>> my too long a life.
>>>
>>> Those who still cook at home should have gas or electricity. Induction
>>> stoves and kettles waste very little energy in heating the air. Commercial
>>> cooking could use advanced biomass stoves - at a larger scale and higher
>>> utilization rates - plus commercial wages, not domestic slavery - the real
>>> market for biomass cooking is outside the home.
>>>
>>> If stove designers don't know how to think of cooks, dwellings,
>>> cuisines, and instead mess around with fictional stove, cook, dwelling and
>>> air flow, I think they should be kicked out of the kitchen.
>>>
>>> As in Harry Truman's dictum, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of
>>> the kitchen."
>>>
>>> Or as I would say, get our heads out of the fireboxes and stop smoking
>>> our intellectual airs. Do the donors a favor - tell them we have fooled
>>> them because they were ready to be fooled.
>>>
>>> Speaking of experiments with cooking and room temperature change, please
>>> see the attached report. I think it is a considerable advancement on the
>>> current state of stove testing.
>>>
>>> Make a guess about source and date.
>>>
>>>
>>> Nikhil
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
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>
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