[Stoves] News: World Bank blog on eradicating household air pollution

Nikhil Desai ndesai at alum.mit.edu
Tue Apr 18 10:13:10 CDT 2017


Crispin:

"One of the comments we repeatedly get is, ‘That looks exactly like a gas
fire.’ Well, all fires are gas fires."

Duh!

"Cooks like gas" was Kirk Smith's epiphany six years ago. "Looks like (a)
gas (fire)" is a beginning. (Look up 1979 OTA report The Direct Use of
Coal.)

I think you need a metric for those.

Next year's ETHOS - and this year's CCF 2017 - should have on its agenda -
"Looks and cooks like gas". With separate presentations on size, dishes,
pots, what not.

I am particularly glad you work on coal. Geographies and histories of coal
heating stoves in some areas today are coterminous with poverty, and I like
your characterization of new coal heating stoves in terms of "access to
modern energy". Human environments improve with modern energy; more CO2 and
less hydrocarbon emitted in the air per kg of inherent carbon, the better,
don't you think?

Now, if you want some radical ideas on how homes or people can change
temperatures, look at Japan’s house for all seasons
<https://www.ft.com/content/b54da188-830e-11e5-8e80-1574112844fd> Sophie
Knight, Financial Times, 13 November 2015 and MIT Wristband Could Make AC
Obsolete
<https://www.wired.com/2013/10/an-ingenious-wristband-that-keeps-your-body-at-the-perfect-temperature-no-ac-required/>
Kyle
Vanhemert  (Wired, 30 October 2013).

Wouldn't be lovely to have pots that would get hot and cold by themselves?
Better still, just by our wishing?

Nikhil


------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(India +91)909 995 2080
*Skype: nikhildesai888*

On Tue, Apr 18, 2017 at 7:47 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> Dear Nikhil
>
>
>
> *>*World Bank is not proposing LPG for heating stoves in Kyrgyzstan.
>
>
>
> That’s for sure. They are proposing to localise the production of stoves
> developed in Tajikistan at Caritas Switzerland in Muminabod.
>
>
>
> >Yes, there is a fake, ideological, cultural war in the name of premature
> mortality by solid fuels. The gas and electric industries may seem to
> benefit, but people aren't rushing to buy gas or electricity to save their
> lives but because they are convenient and versatile.
>
>
>
> So if the other solid, liquid and gas-fueled stoves deliver the same or
> superior service, they will be preferred. I have no problem with that.
>
>
>
> >Lomborg too thinks air pollution kills 7 million people a year and
> says says "Providing 1.4 billion people with such improved stoves would
> save almost 450,000 lives a year and avoid almost 2.5 billion days of
> illness annually."
>
>
>
> I suspect Herr Lomborg is mistaken. If it were true, then people living in
> the highest levels of PM2.5 air pollution would live the shortest lives.
> Looking at life expectancy in various countries, this is not the
> supportable conclusion.
>
>
> >That said, the blog is very carefully written, including the last
> sentence - "eventually there will need to be a switch from solid fuels to
> LPG or electricity."
>
> Which is to say crafty. Perhaps they should consider some practical and
> inexpensive alternatives, one of which is space heating using a coiled pipe
> under heaped biomass. It works in a Canadian winter.
>
>
> >…Making and burning "combustion gases" is probably key to making clean
> enough, usable, marketable stoves using solid fuels, direct or processed.
>
>
>
> That was the topic of a presentation this afternoon on how to pyrolyse
> coal and run the gases through a hot coke bed to be thermally cracked
> before they get to the combustion chamber.  One of the comments we
> repeatedly get is, ‘That looks exactly like a gas fire.’ Well, all fires
> are gas fires.
>
>
>
> Regards
>
> Crispin
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20170418/096f0f5b/attachment.html>


More information about the Stoves mailing list