[Stoves] Who/WHO wants "applied stove science and testing to the people who need stove services"? (Re: Cecil)

[Traveller]

Moderator: This is Part 2 of response to Cecil Cook's comment in response
to Anil.

Cecil wrote:

"we are wasting time arguing over global stove performance standards and
tests. We are still in the model T stage of the development of the small
household stove industry. A global ISO process is counter productive
because it is very premature. We need to bring practical role of thumb as
well sophisticated applied stove science and testing to the people who need
stove services, We need simple tried and true test methods that involve the
end users and stove producers. As Crispin has been urging we need
 competent stove scientists who know how to evolve optimized stoves *in
situ.*"


What is counter-productive to us - those who seek to improve solid fuel
combustion by design changes (I know nothing about stove designs) or by
policy (which I have been interested in) - is very fruitful to the rest in
the businesses of raising spending large sums of money or making grants for
them.

(Disclosure: I have taken a public position that the terms "improved
stoves" and "clean stoves" be retired and the term "modern cooking" -
transition from 19th to 21st Centuries - be used to convey a cook-friendly
paradigm. "Modern cooking" need not be confined to "modern fuels", however
defined. Modernizing biomass fuel cycle is a favorite topic with me.)

My verbose take below. If it offends anybody in particular, I request you
read it again.

a) We waste time because the stakes - grants for research and small
interventions - are so small. "Stoving" has become a cottage industry with
perennial food fights, so making global claims or servile obeisance to such
claims has become necessary for survival. In a way the stovers suffer
poverty and anxieties not entirely dissimilar to those of people they seek
to help. To speak in Kuhnian terms, we need a paradigm change -- move
attention from various boxes (firebox and combustion science, room box and
dispersion science, house box and exposure science), stop obfuscating local
environmental damage via reducing it to "trees saved", and expose the
anti-poor agenda of the global saviors. (Disclosure: I have been one of
those and will do so again, so long as there is a link to poverty
alleviation.)

b) There is an ideological war on solid fuels, rationalized in terms of
"global burden of health" and "global climate change". Whereas design of
solid fuel stoves must necessarily be context-specific and keep the
economic geography of demand in mind, this war threatens the poor and the
stovers community this is.

   - The poor are more closely tied to their local environments;
   - I trust or hope they care more about individual burdens of disease,
   including individual exposures to specific hazards of which solid cookfuel
   emissions are but one;
   - Solid fuels tend to be locally specific; though long distance
   transport of fuelwood and charcoal is not uncommon, it is because the wood
   transported is of sufficiently uniform quality;
   - Supply chains of all fuels, stoves, appliances are locally specific -
   even the "last mile" electricity distribution grids or LPG retailing are
   tailored to each mile, and biomass combustion is almost "one stove at a
   time";
   - Cooking and diet preferences vary across regions, over time, and even
   within cultures.

c) While the ISO process may be counter-productive, there are specific
reasons for the way things are going on (driven by modeling frameworks):

   - Anoint some experts' view that fuel efficiency and emission rates are
   the sole criteria for public policy on cookstoves using solid fuels (no
   care for drudgery, time savings);
   - Avoid discussion of fuel chemistry and supply chains, ignore emissions
   from food and non-cooking sources, and exposures to other pollutants (*);
   - Forswear consideration of ventilation, dwelling design (and changes
   therein over time) so that "boxes" can be applied to modeling
   concentrations from emission rates;
   - Rule out "stacking" as a consideration in IAQ, and ignore the whole
   challenge of outdoor air quality management strategies;
   - Posit standardized cooking by standardized cooks in standardized
   environments so modeling is neat and simple, promoting lifetime careers;
   and, while doing so,
   - Drive out funding for alternative paradigms of cooking, stoves, cooks
   and all.

All this for boiling water. Fernando Manibog showed 30+ years ago the
limits of such mania. (I was his research assistant.)

d) Identification of "people who need stove services" entails research on
cooking - in and outside households - and the nature of competition among
fuels, appliances across dietary habits. In turn this may require research
on local biomass balances - multiple sources and uses, with corresponding
opportunity cost of resources - and local burdens of health. Cooking and
cooks should define the framework for stoves, not hi-falutin' global
models. Why, Journal of Home Economics published fuel and stove evaluations
in December 1909; little has changed for the bulk of the world's poor.

It is not for nothing that USG has committed about $70+ million to research
by EPA and NIH or that Turner (UN) Foundation pays a director average $300k
a year (2012-14) to promote the "clean cookstoves" disguise of "clean
fuels". (Disclosure: I do support gas and electricity.)

e) The apparatus of concocting "$/DALY" critically depends on the GACC/DfID
"Evidence Base to catalyse a global market for Clean Cookstoves and Fuels"
(see previous post), a part of which process in turn requires international
certification of cleanliness for boiling water and WHO/EPA/BAMG exercise of
manufacturing kitchen air concentrations, exposures, and averted DALYs.

WHO certainly doesn't want "applied stove science and testing to the people
who need stove services".

***

GACC has sponsored some interesting market research and awareness projects,
and even helped stove marketing. If it is waiting for WHO/EPA or ISO
blessings to do more on investment interventions, it is "wasting time",
unless donor support depends on manufactured evidence base. (I don't blame
GACC.)

Nikhil

(*) The way WHO/GBD modeling works is via "integrating" not exposures of
individuals but only diffuse - and highly disparate - literature that
associates individual types of air pollution - ambient, second-hand tobacco
smoking, household stoves using solid fuels - with diverse diseases. This
"integration" is spurious accuracy. In any case, human beings do not suffer
one pollutant exposure or one disease throughout their lifetime. And
certainly individuals do not suffer one pollution source per day.
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