[Stoves] Now on-topic: Challenge to Ron to define service standard and goals for "better biomass stoves"

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Ron

Thanks for raising a key point already covered in this discussion already:

>[RWL7:  It is my strong opinion that you are in a very small minority on this view.  It would help your case a lot if you gave a few cites who agree with you.   I find many dozens of cites in Ajay’s thesis in support of what he has done - and which you have otherwise deplored.  Here is a key figure (#5.6) from that thesis that I find very well argued and find convincing.

[cid:image001.png at 01D2586D.6A506960]

(It opens larger for me, hope so for others).  It is his Fig 5.6a, with of course much more detail available there.    This figure says that about $1500 (for added chimneys) will avert one DALY - and that this action would be highly cost effective.  How would you or anyone argue to not use this information?  I am hoping for specifics - not generalities.

This is the ‘trick’ (like ‘Mike’s Nature trick’) that is relied upon to sell refrigerators to Eskimos or Brooklyn Bridges to tourists:

Adding a chimney to an individual’s house averts 1 DALY.

Defend this claim.

As Nikhil has explained very carefully, we have absolutely no idea if adding a chimney to a particular home will avert anything at all, for the occupants or anyone else. DALYs are, in the first place, figments of the imaginations of modelers and only have a meaning for an entire population (in which a cohort of a total population may be identified for statistical purposes). It apparently has not sunk in that you cannot make claims for the total population based on a change in the exposure to smoke of one person, or 100 people, or 1000. That is not how the GBD number-generating system works.

Nikhil already pointed, more than once as I recall, that GBD numbers refer to the past, people who died and whose deaths were attributed to a melange of diseases on a statistical basis. They tell us nothing about future deaths and premature deaths. The claim for a chimney added to a home is for future impact, which cannot be known until that cohort of the population has died, and a committee meets to discuss their nutrition, sex, health services, inoculations, diet and dietary changes, air pollution, water contamination, transport, violent death risk and so one and on. The whole point is that a developing country is developing, not static. You cannot make claims about what people will die of in future and how long they will live based on what people dies of and how long they used to live if they were born in 1930.

You have to accept what the GBD numbers are and what a DALY claims to be before one start claiming to have ‘averted three of them’.

Regards
Crispin

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: winmail.dat
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 59060 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20161217/ad98fe57/attachment.bin>