[Stoves] News 31 October 2016: Cleaner, Healthier Cookstoves May -- At Long Last -- Be Catching On.

[Traveller]

News 31 October 2016: Cleaner, Healthier Cookstoves May -- At Long Last --
Be Catching On. <http://ensia.com/features/cleaner-cookstoves/>

He wrote another opinion piece These cheap, clean stoves were supposed to
save millions of lives. What happened?
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/these-cheap-clean-stoves-were-supposed-to-save-millions-of-lives-what-happened/2015/10/29/c0b98f38-77fa-11e5-a958-d889faf561dc_story.html>
a
year ago (Washington Post, 29 Oct 2015).

Good to see someone keeping tabs on charities and their promises, if not
premises.

I will write on last year's piece later. Like that one, this piece is good
but employs a lot of old men's and infantile fancies.

"Household air pollution from cooking fires is thought to be the world’s
leading environmental cause
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3672215/> of death and
disability."

** An unverifiable allegation. Not a CAUSE, simply an attribution to a risk
factor, based on fictional data, and dubious methods. **

"The problems with cookstoves are legion. The vast majority of stoves fail
to meet strict World Health Organization standards that are set to protect
human health. (Designing a stove that works effectively for fuels that vary
in their moisture content or chemical composition is difficult.)"

**Who gave WHO jurisdiction to put "standards"? (They are only guidelines,
and their provenance is so far a mystery to me. If the IAQ guidelines are
based on GBD gobbledy-gook, I suspect there is a fundamental failure.) What
does WHO know about combustion or cooking? Did it set IAQ Guidelines
decidedly so low as to drive most of stove-makers or solid fuels out of
business? **

"With the exception of a massive government-financed program in China in
the 1990s, no government, philanthropic or commercial cookstove program has
been shown to deliver large-scale, measurable health or environmental
benefits. Up in Smoke <http://www.nber.org/papers/w18033>, a 2012 field
study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, found no
long-term health or environmental benefits in households in India that had
been given a clean stove, mostly because the stoves weren’t properly
maintained or were discarded."

** This is repetition of lies by citation. The MIT cons did no "long-term"
study and used a stove design that had long been abandoned by its original
creators. These e-cons know nothing about cooking, or health, and would be
dismissed anywhere if they weren't ensconced in Cambridge, MA. It was a
poorly designed research project with a ridiculous mania; what is worse, in
the Working Paper draft I reviewed, their conclusions were contrary to
their findings detailed at the back. What a fraud. **

"Whatever one thinks about carbon credits for cookstoves — and they are
controversial — they distort the market by providing subsidies and cannot
be relied upon as a long-term revenue source."

** Subsidies to the poor or to new technologies have been accepted as a
legitimate purpose of public expenditure for decades. This nonsense of
"distort the market" only means subsidies are for the rich, punitive and
failed markets for the poor. **

"What’s more, most experts think that local manufacturers, who sell
lower-quality stoves at lower prices, outsell the U.S.-based companies. “I
can name 20 different entrepreneurs across Africa who sells 350 to 500
stoves a month, or more, and the numbers add up,” says Elisha Moore Delate,
an independent consultant and cookstove expert based in Nairobi. These
cheaper stoves may not deliver the health or environmental benefits of
higher quality ones, but they do save poor people money, which is no small
thing."

** Another set of unverifiable allegations. The cheaper stoves may well be
more usable. Obviously they are used more. **

"More importantly, will cleaner efficient cookstoves improve the health of
customers and state of the global environment? That’s also hard to know
because reliable data on their real-life performance is scarce
<http://cleancookstoves.org/technology-and-fuels/standards/defining-clean-and-efficient.html>
."

** Oh, data is not a problem. GBD has cooked up the health impacts with
pitiful "data", mostly assumptions and computed estimates.

Make merry in the South Lawn and the Imperial Hotel. With Leonardo
DeCaprio. And excuse GACC's premises and promises. **

Nikhil
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