[Stoves] We're Actually Using More Fossil Fuels Than Ever (Anand Karve)

Traveller miata98 at gmail.com
Wed Jul 20 06:29:22 CDT 2016


In resonse to Dr. Karve:

Whether LPG is "costlier than wood" is difficult to determine. As you
rightly point out, people buy convenience - and hence, the time to do other
things or relax - if that is what they prefer. Otherwise they put cooks in
lower levels of family and social hierarchies (young daughters-in-law,
hired help) to do the drudgery of fuelwood, dung collection, preparation,
ash handling, sometimes the whole cooking enterprise. With LPG can come
pressure-cookers and with electricity can come grinders, kettles and
geysers. Paper economics of household cooking by the advocates of improved
woodstoves are tiring. (I have done enough of those too.)

Thank you for also pointing out that large commercial users take to non-LPG
alternatives. It never made sense to me that biomass stovers kept obsessing
over "rural poor households", a group that a) has complex budgeting
algorithms for time and money, and understandably resists switching to
cumbersome "improved biomass stoves", and b) aspires to something else.

Oh, well. Donor grants dictate what good intentions we ought to have. There
is a risk that we believe our own fiction.

Nikhil


Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 10:03:10 +0530
From: Anand Karve <adkarve at gmail.com>
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
        <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] We're Actually Using More Fossil Fuels Than Ever
Message-ID:
        <CACPy7Sdvo8U9jhKiLahEdOA6s3To1HW4G=xX3+qTbg-krB_XNw at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Dear Stovers,

1.  Glaciation and warming of climate after a period of glaciation are
cyclic phenomena that have occurred many times before our time. If the
global temperatures are currently rising, we can expect that the next
period of glaciation is nearing.

2. LPG is widely being propagated by Government of India as clean cooking
fuel, but it is costlier than wood.  Householders are ready to use LPG
because of its convenience, but many restaurants and canteens, as well as
factories having boilers, use either fuel briquettes made by compressing
agricultural waste or wood, because it is cheaper. Excellent wood-burning
stoves are now available and our business sells them to such large scale
users.
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)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20160720/18745f0c/attachment.html>


More information about the Stoves mailing list