[Stoves] OTA and method of science v. policy advocacy (Re: Cecil, Crispin)

[Traveller]

Moderator: I changed the subject line.
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Mr. Cook:

WOW!! It is so gratifying to find someone who remembers OTA, and fondly.

OTA taught me a lot. I wondered about staff directors on individual
reports; they brought together consultants and advisors from many fields
and experiences, then crafting unassailable reports.

I regarded OTA higher than all US government agencies, including the
Congressional Research Service and the General Accounting Office (my other
favorites).
-------

I very much agree with the view "methods and models can divide and
antagonize".  This is because methods have become religious rituals and
scientists in search of grants innovate in methods and models because
that's how they differentiate themselves and create a "groupie culture".

What stovers argue among themselves mirrors the food/fund fight of science
and, more importantly, advocacy groups who have to catch attention with
outlandish claims (that HAP "kills", for instance) because they too have to
persuade the funders.

Knowingly or unknowingly, scientists become tools of bureaucrats and
self-proclaimed "saviors" (of the earth, of the poor, of poor women,
whatever).

Dan Dimiduk is on-the-mark about advocates conflating claims by merging
diverse issues that have partisan divides. That is a trick to deceive
funders who may also get in on the game. I noticed that in the DfID program
for clean energy with Teri; bureaucrats have an easier time justifying how
one stone will kill five birds at the same time.

Or a miracle stove will cook five meals at the same time - meal for the
cook and her family, meal for the M&E beancounters, meal for epidemiology
and GBD cooks, meal for bureaucrats, meal for Mrs Clinton.

This is inescapable. I have also marketed promises.

Let's just be honest and accept the rot that is our fate. No point
agonizing over some idealized past.

Still, it is good to spice up the discussions.

I suggest one particular OTA report from 1978 - Direct Use of Coal. It is a
corrective to the notion that fuels per se are dirty, as the GACC/EPA/WHO
combine propaganda claims.

Kirk Smith, et al. wrote in 2000 that it is not the fuels but how they are
burned. And that CO2 is the least harmful species.

"Simple stoves using solid fuels do not merely convert fuel carbon into
carbon dioxide (CO2 ), which is then taken up by vegetation during the next
growing season. Because of poor combustion conditions, such stoves actually
divert a significant portion of the fuel carbon into products of incomplete
combustion (PICs), which in general have greater impacts on climate than CO2.
Eventually most PICs are oxidized to CO 2, but in the meantime they have
greater global warming potentials than CO2 by itself. *Indeed, if one is
going to put carbon gases into the atmosphere, the least damaging from a
global warming standpoint is CO** 2**, most PICs have a higher impact
per carbon atom. The policy implications of this diversion of carbon to
PICs are **profound.*" (Smith et al. 2000)

James Hansen said something comparable. On that separately.

Nikhil


On Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 11:31 AM, <cec1863 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
> *From: *cec1863 at gmail.com
> *Sent: *Saturday, September 10, 2016 10:34 AM
> *To: *Dan Dimiduk
> *Subject: *A few footnotes about the late great Congressional Office of
> Technology Assessment (OTA) - back to the future?
>
>
> Greetings,
>
> These days the  Congressional Office of Technology Assessment exists only
> in the realm of memory and a searchable data base at a website in
> Princeton. ‎It was terminated in the mid 1990s by the Senate and the House
> long before the T Party during B Clinton's second term and may have been
> collateral damage caused by Newt Gingrich's Contract with America. See what
> Grand Pa Google and Wikipedia have to say?
>
> I worked briefly for OTA briefly in the late 1970's and early 80's on a
> comprehensive look at the potential contribution of appropriate technology
> - as defined by Schumacher in his big book - Small Is Beautiful. He
> convincingly argued that the design and fabrication of technos should be
> decentralized and de-scaled to the point where Communitas could
> democratically humanize technology.... thereby ensuring that TECHNOS serves
> rather than dominates humanity. The "TA" that resulted was entitled
> something like "technology for local development".
>
> There are some 500 down loadable TA's in the OTA data base.
>
> The point I was trying to make is that big or little science and it's
> methods and models can divide and antagonize or it can be used to gradually
> build an inclusive  common ground that is dynamic enough to unify and
> create useful new science and technologies that create new and fairly
> distributed wealth that is environmentally neutral and net positive for our
> species!
>
> Slow and steady wins most marathons!!
>
> I suppose the appropriate technology movement of the 1970's tried to
> administer a  stiff dose of modesty about the role of science and technos
> in perfecting human affairs. It was a methodology for reducing  the
> bureaucratic abuse of science by governmental bodies at all levels of
> organization. AT was simply about getting plain old fashioned hubris out of
> government by lowering the fantasy factor; remember Bucky Fuller talking
> endlessly about "doing more with less". Good engineering practice but not
> much comfort when there is not enough to eat.
>
> Forgive the deja vu. I've gotten old along the way. Slow and steady also
> leads to the grave!
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
> *From: *Dan Dimiduk
> *Sent: *Saturday, September 10, 2016 8:11 AM
> *To: *cec1863 at gmail.com
> *Subject: *Re: [Stoves] News 9 September 2016: Biofuels "worse than
> petrol" for the environment, new study finds
>
> Where is the OTA?   Same place the rest of the government went when the
> Tea Party dismantled it. - Dan
>
> *Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID*
>
>
> cec1863 at gmail.com wrote:
>
> ‎OMG Crispin the sky is refusing to fall on Chicken Little's head! Time to
> re-model or is it simply a case of mistaken identity where CO2 is falsely
> accused of being the main culprit in the Climate Change soap opera.  What
> would Gilbert and Sullivan have done with Climate - to change or not to
> change - as a tragicomic operetta?  Think of an adaptation of the Mikado.
> Who plays the Lord High Executioner.
>
> Science and the internet are apparently uneasy bedfellows. ‎Why? Because
> it is now so easy to provoke world wide media riots by asking talking head
> experts the wrong questions. Presto: we get to witness scientists behaving
> badly on NPR and PBS not mention the FOX empire.
>
> Where is the defunct Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)
> when we desperately need non partisan "science tribunals" capable of
> bringing together public interest scientists to creatively reconcile their
> different points of view.
>
> During the 1970's and 80's the OTA created a nonpartisan (neutral) arena
> in which scientists were formed into balanced teams to research and report
> upon controversial matters in science to the congressmen and women elected
> to serve the best interest of their constituents.
>
> In so far as humanly possible, the OTA funded a neutral institutional
> space where multi-disciplinary teams of scientists were asked to work thru
> their differences and disagreements over  evidence, conceptualizations,
> methods of observation and instrumentation, and the application of science
> to the solution of real world problems. The end point of OTA was to avoid
> counter productive partisan science by growing the common ground and
> innovating the next generation of experimentation required to practically
> and theoretically resolve big science questions
>
> The OTA apparently grew from Ralph Nader's path breaking work on consumer
> protection in the 1960's and 1970's which fed and cross pollinated with the
> Science for the Citizen Program at NSF. It is obvious to me that we
> desperately need the heroic services of a resurrected OTA type institution
> in the USA to replace digital fora with face to face meetings and
> processes that charge small multi-disciplinary groups of scientists‎ with
> inventing or discovering sufficient common ground to actually serve the
> public interest in the field of small stoves for the half a billions
> households at the BOP.
>
> il they manage to resolve highly partisan issues of such divisive
> questions as:  climate dynamics, gendering, GMO foods, chemical farming,
> costs/benefits of antibiotics in animal feeds, energy economics and
> environmental accounting, causes & cures of drug addiction epidemics, and -
> perhaps even - the identification of APPROPRATE domestic stove indicators
> and program objectives, etc.....then science will begin to advance the well
> being of all the citizens of the USA and the citizens of the world.
>
> The list of highly politicized issues is very long and conflicts dividing
> the experts acrimonous. Tragically the dominant modes of faceless digital
> communication in these early days of the internet era make it difficult or
> even impossible to build bridges and discover the latent common ground
> between right and left, conservative and progressive world views.
>
> Nader as an 80 something activist is now preaching that left and right,
> conservative and progressive, must unite in the radical center!
>
> The ISO for small stoves is apparently very premature‎. Imagine Ford and
> Chevrolet and all the early car makers trying to agree on an ISO that led
> to the perfect car for the bottom thtird  of humanity. Surely we need more
> of Crispin's high performance stoves which empower the local stove
> fabricators and traditional fuel producers thereby strengthening the
> regional economies of Tajekistan et al and everybody up and down the
> domestic stove value creation chain. If Crispin has helped in situ stove
> makers to fabricate a superior household stove for ± $30 then let the
> competition for the Tadjik stove market begin in earnest!
>
> Bravo Crispin!
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
>
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