[Stoves] [Stoves Digest, Vol 81, Issue 21] Another attack on solid fuels by public health adventurers

[Nikhil Desai]

Karin: (Crispin and other commentators to your posts cc'd).

Crispin's post reminded me of this trail, so let me offer my thoughts to
your 26 May 2017 posts to me and separately to Crispin.

1. You cite yourself "in 2013 the cost per kg of LPG with subsidy was
USD$0.65 in the Dominican Republic, USD$0.6 in Brazil, USD $0.44 in El
Salvador, USD$0.33 in Bolivia, USD$0.13 in Ecuador and USD$0.07 in
Venezuela (OLADE, 2012; Kojima, 2013b).

That does not compare the size of subsidy if defined as the difference
between a reference "market price" versus a retail "consumer price". All
you have done is list prices, not subsidies.

2. You say that people in Chiapas who spend $20 a month on purchased
firewood claim that they cannot afford $16 a month for equivalent (or more,
considering the savings in time). This is not rational behavior, so there
are no conclusions to be drawn about subsidy.

3. That tortilla cannot be made with LPG stoves seems to be a
misperception, belied by LPG and electric tortilla makers around here in
Washington and, from what I hear, in cities in Central America. I think
your paper for the World Bank made that point.

4. Your references to India are misinformed, dated and irrelevant. Your
paper has not said anything but the obvious - the price elasticity of LPG
demand for household cooking in Latin American countries seems to be
non-zero. Nobody ever claimed that subsidies don't make a difference. How
much, how long, and whether they are priority claims on public budget are
issues you didn't address.

5. It is incongruent to claim that "reasons behind firewood use are more
complex" AND at the same time praise subsidies without mentioning the
extent of subsidies.

Please don't misunderstand my criticism, which I stand by. I agree with
your conclusion but I don't see any data or analysis to lead to that
conclusion.

As for alleged health gain from "clean fuels", I do not know what
"evidence" you refer to in your response to Crispin; I didn't find any
reference in your paper.

There is no evidence whatsoever of specific, quantified health gains from
use of liquid or gaseous fuels or electricity for household cooking in the
last 100 years. If there was, we wouldn't need professors and students
struggling hard in Malawi for months and years to find such a causal
relationship in even a town.

And for alleged health loss from "dirty fuels," I have written to IHME and
have confirmed that there is no systematic evidence of exposures to
household solid cooking fuels supposedly suffered by the 4+ million people
who dies in 2015. WHO itself admits as much -- that model estimates (not
data) on % of households supposedly using solid fuels as their principal
cooking energy source amounts to "exposure".

That is, "solid fuels" are a proxy, a practical surrogate for pollution
exposure. Since the % of household claiming at some point or another - -
data are spotty - - that the principal energy source for cooking is some
solid fuel or another, then that proportion of the population suffers HAP
"exposures" by definition, no matter what the fuel, stove, or operating
practices.

If you have any other data, I would like to see them. I have read all the
relevant WHO and Kirk Smith papers but haven't got the database from
Kalpana Balakrishnan.

-------------------------------------------

Now a note to Crispin:

If there is a war against solid fuels for household cooking, please just
keep the larger truth in focus: It doesn't matter a hoot.

When you read their original texts from WHO, IHME, UC-Berkeley and BAMG,
 and parse the language, they really don't mean to say anything substantive
against "dirty fuels" or "clean fuels". They are just throwing words around
to get under the skin of people like you who hold science to a higher
standard.

Yes, LPG use can lower household PM2.5 concentration to 10 μg/m3 on an
"annual average" basis, if the background concentration was zero. Note
"annual average". With that kind of annual average, it is theoretically
possible to reach WHO indoor air quality guideline of 25 μg/m3.

Anything is possible in a fact-free world.

If "dirty fuels" or "dirty cookstoves" produce "dirty air" - whether or not
people are exposed to it - do "clean fuels" or "clean cookstoves" produce
"clean air"?

Now, THAT will be worth publishing in Energy Policy. Let's do that.

Nikhil


---------- Forwarded message ----------
 Von: Karin Troncoso<mailto:karintroncoso at gmail.com>
Gesendet: ?26.?05.?2017 16:55
An: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org<mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Betreff: Re: [Stoves] Another attack on solid fuels by public health Stoves
Digest, Vol 81, Issue 19

Dear list and Nikhil

I am glad that my paper reached your attention, I was planning to share it
with the list anyway.

The purpose of the paper was to do an exploratory analysis of the effects
of LPG subsidies in LAC on reducing the use of solid fuels.

Nikhil said that the paper does not mention LPG prices or subsidies. This
is not true. It says:

?Subsidies vary significantly between countries. For example, in 2013 the
cost per kg of LPG with subsidy was USD$0.65 in the Dominican Republic,
USD$0.6 in Brazil, USD $0.44 in El Salvador, USD$0.33 in Bolivia, USD$0.13
in Ecuador and USD$0.07 in Venezuela (OLADE, 2012; Kojima, 2013b).? The
idea was to compare level of subsidies between those countries and
therefore we use the same unit (kg).

We did not mention firewood prices, as they vary a lot even in a given
country, and precisely in the paper we acknowledge that firewood usually is
cheap or even free in LAC. With the exception of some urban cities, LPG
would never compete with firewood prices, unless there is a big subsidy.

Nikhil is right, we give an example without mentioning the size of the
cylinder or the amount of firewood bought. We wrote: ?Kojima?s studies on
the response of users to relative prices indicate that firewood prices
would need to increase considerably before a household would consider
replacing firewood for LPG for economic reasons. In Mexico for instance, a
study performed by the authors (to be published) in two rural communities
of Chiapas in February 2017, showed that 59% of the households already pay
in average 370 pesos (US$ 20) per month to buy firewood. The cost of a LPG
cylinder is 300 pesos (USD 16) and people that use LPG exclusively in these
communities buy a cylinder every three or four weeks. When asked why not
they use LPG to cook all their meals, 96% said because they cannot afford
it. When asked if they will use it if the cost of the cylinder was 50
pesos, 82% said they would use it, but 14% said maybe and 4% said no,
because there are other considerations besides the price, as for example,
the difficulty to make tortillas with a regular LPG stove.? The reason we
did not have the need to give that information was again, because what we
wanted to show was that many households are already spending almost the
same amount of money per month in firewood that what they would need for
LPG. The example was intended to show that reasons behind firewood use are
more complex than just the assumption that because you already spend money
buying firewood you are going to switch to LPG. It is a good example that
to take something from a paper completely out of context can be misleading.

We mentioned India with the only purpose of showing the efforts of some
countries to modify universal subsidies that are very difficult to reform:

?Many countries are seeking strategies to reform universal subsidies to
better target the poorest population, as is the case of El Salvador. In
India, a national program called "give it up" is asking middle class
members to give up their LPG subsidy (US$ 30-40), which will be transferred
to a poor family. 30,000 people each month are donating their subsidy,
representing a shift of US$ 1 trillion to the poor (The Economic Times,
2016).? It is completely irrelevant for the paper.

Again, why do you center your attack to the paper in examples that have
nothing to do with the main line of research? That it is: subsidies seem to
have helped switching to LPG the solid fuel users in urban areas in Bolivia
and El Salvador and almost everybody in Ecuador and Venezuela. Targeted
subsidies may be an option to increase access to clean fuels by 2030.

Finally, we do not represent public health and promoting clean fuels when
possible is not a war against solid fuels. It is my aspiration that one day
everybody has access to clean fuels for all their needs, and this may
require switching to electricity, biogas and other clean fuels (clean from
the point of view of health). It may require the development of new
technologies that may use solid fuels. Helping poor people to have access
to LPG or electricity with a subsidy may be part of the solution.

Karin Troncoso



Message: 13
Date: Sat, 20 May 2017 09:52:49 +0530
From: Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com<mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com>>
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
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Subject: [Stoves] Another attack on solid fuels by public health
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Available for free for a few days more. LPG fuel subsidies in Latin America
and the use of solid fuels to cook
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517302719>, Karin
Troncoso, forthcoming in Energy Policy Volume 107, August 2017, Pages
188?196

"This study analyzes the relation between fuel subsidies to LPG and
solid fuel use."

Without mentioning LPG price or a subsidy. Where the price of a cylinder
is mentioned, the size of the cylinder is not mentioned. And when
expenditure on fuelwood is mentioned, the volume/weight of the purchase is
not mentioned.

It's cite-o-logy galore, peppering platitudes by throwing in some names
and dates at the end, as if that shows any proof of validity of the
assertion.

Any purpose to this?

Simple. The Quixotic war against solid fuels.

Public health (profession) can be a risk factor for solid fuel use.

Take this sentence "India opted for a voluntary program called ?give it
up? that asks middle class LPG consumers to give up their LPG fuel
subsidy (US$16 per year), which is transferred to a poor family. As of
April 2016, 10 million people had adhered to the program (The Economic
Times, 2016 <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151
7302719#bib41>)."

What utter baloney to say "10 million people had adhered to the
program". GiveItUp and alleged transfer of the subsidy to a poor family is
a gimmick. Most of those "given up" subsidies were fictitious or not
utilized in the first place, but our Modi government is as good at cooking
up numbers as WHO and if $16 a year or less than one US penny a day per
capita is the LPG price subsidy in India, there are a few billion dollars
somewhere in the gutters of Indian cities.

Lesson: Skip the whole paper. I am collecting gratitude at the rate
of $1.90 per capita per day.

DOES ANY BODY CARE

Nikhil

 --------------------------------------------------------------------


On May 26, 2017, at 9:56 PM, Karin Troncoso <karintroncoso at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Crispin

The note that you cited fro our paper saying that the Philips stove reduces
PM2.5 concentration by only 66% was a cite of the work by Muralidharan et
al., 2015. It is based in a KPT not in a WBT: “Here, we tested a
traditional clay chulha cookstove (TCS) and five commercially available
ACSs, including both natural draft (Greenway Smart Stove, Envirofit PCS-1)
and forced draft stoves (BioLite HomeStove, Philips Woodstove HD4012, and
Eco-Chulha XXL), in a test kitchen in a rural village of western India.
Compared to the TCS, the ACSs produced significant reductions in
particulate matter less than 2.5 µm (PM2.5) and CO concentrations
(Envirofit: 22%/16%, Greenway: 24%/42%, BioLite: 40%/35%, Philips: 66%/55%
and Eco-Chulha: 61%/42%), which persisted after normalization for fuel
consumption or useful energy. PM2.5 and CO concentrations were lower for
forced draft stoves than natural draft stoves. Furthermore, the Philips and
Eco-Chulha units exhibited higher cooking efficiency than the TCS. Despite
significant reductions in concentrations, all ACSs failed to achieve
PM2.5 levels
that are considered safe by the World Health Organization (ACSs: 277–714 μ
g/m3 or 11–28 fold higher than the WHO recommendation of 25 μg/m3;)”

The objective of our paper was not to support LPG industry, but to show
that LPG subsidies have helped to give access to this clean fuel (clean
from a health perspective) to the poor in countries like Ecuador,
Venezuela, Bolivia and El Salvador. As we wrote, there are many barriers
for the use of LPG, and infrastructure and willingness to use it are some
of them. The paper was not intended to evaluate solid fuels stoves
performances; the proposition is a simple one: some countries in LAC have
been giving subsidies to LPG for many years, what are the results? Do those
countries have less use of solid fuel for cooking than expected? Yes, they
do.

The implication is only that helping the poor to buy clean fuels may be
part of the solution towards universal access to clean fuels.

Until today, there is not a solid fuel stove that reduces exposure enough
as to comply with the WHO guidelines for indoor air quality. It is a high
standard. It is hard to reach. You may choose to believe that it was
settled for some obscure purposes but I believe that they are evidence’
based. If there are new technologies than can achieve dramatic reductions
in PM2.5 exposure using solid fuels, that would be great news,  if you have
evidence like the study from Fresh air and the World Bank to share, I would
appreciate it. I definitely think that the solution it’s not a single one
and it will be a combination of policies, strategies, fuels and
technologies. Targeted subsidies to LPG and electricity may be part of the
solution.

I have been researching adoption of fuels and technologies to cook for the
past 10 years. As part of my work, I have interviewed hundreds of women in
Latin American countries and I have found that the economic barriers
overcome the cultural barriers to the adoption of clean fuels. Many women
have expressed their wish to be able to afford LPG to cook. I think that we
have to keep in mind their wish to have access to the same benefits that we
already enjoy, when considering solutions for the poor.

Best Regards
Karin

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Friends

In case there be any doubt as to the nature of the war on solid fuels, here
is a street-legal extract from the paper mentioned below:

?Though the reasons underlying [use of solid fuels] are complex, it has
been shown to be highly associated with poverty and the lack of access to
clean fuels. Access to clean fuels is difficult to address, given that
individuals may not have the financial resources to buy Liquefied Petroleum
Gas (LPG) or electricity, even when available in their communities. For
this reason, most solutions proposed in poor areas have been focused on
?making the available clean? (i.e. to burn biomass cleanly in improved
biomass stoves), rather than on ?making the clean available? (Smith and
Sagar, 2014). On account of a better combustion, improved biomass stoves
have higher efficiencies a lower emissions of kitchen smoke, while still
relying on solid fuels that are accessible and generally free. These new
improved biomass stoves vary enormously, but none have yet been shown to
sufficiently reduce exposure to PM2.5 to comply
with the WHO's Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality (Smith and Sagar, 2014).
Research on exposure-response shows that the use of LPG leads to
concentrations of PM2.5 below the critical level of 10 ?g per m3, whereas
concentrations measurements in homes with improved biomass stoves have
shown an annual average of 170 ?g per m3 (Johnson and Chiang, 2015; WHO,
2014b). Even the Philips stove, the most advanced biomass stove in the
Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC) catalogue, reduces PM2.5
concentration by only 66% (Muralidharan et al., 2015). This highlights the
importance of ensuring access to clean fuels and not just improving the
combustion and efficiency of biomass stoves. In LAC 90 million people?

There are a lot of things worthy of comment in this one paragraph.
For a start:
?PM2.5 below the critical level of 10 ?g per m3 ?

What? 10 ?g per m3 is so extraordinarily low that no one will meet it. If
it is true that we are all doomed to expire for breathing air containing
generic PM2.5 above that level, we can give up now.

Who says the Philips stove is the most advanced? Reduced what by 66%?
Exposure? Against what baseline? In who?s kitchen? The GACC?s ?stove
catalogue? rates performance based on the WBT which contains so many
conceptual and calculation errors that it renders all test results
irrelevant! How may times must that conversation be held? Simply correcting
the major calculation errors in the WBT moves the stoves around the chart
dramatically. If Berkeley can?t do math and the GACC won?t fix it, we
should simply move on to some rating method that reflects reality. The
entire stove community cannot continue to be held hostage to incompetence
that happens to serve select groups.

The statement that people use solid fuels because of a lack of access to
?clean fuels? assumes that solid fuels are ?unclean?, haram, unwanted,
untouchable: Dalit fuels. There are numerous cases where liquid and gaseous
fuels are available and shunned in favour of solid fuels. The reason is
often economic, but that does not mean ?poverty?. Just economy.

LPG is not acceptable to some people, even whole regions. It is
logistically unacceptable in many regions, and we do not exist to give
subsidies to Big Gas. Biogas, wood gas and coal gas are perfectly viable
alternatives to LPG which is expensive. The industry that supplies it is
highly tied up with a very small number of distributors. It would cut
millions of jobs out of energy industries were it to become ?required?.

?Making the available clean? is obviously the sensible path to take. The
paragraph proposes, in toto, that solid fuels cannot be burned cleanly, and
further, that liquid and gas fuels can, and are, and are safe doing so
(this is all about protecting the public, right?). Note the confabulation
of indoor air quality and unvented stoves with chimney stoves and outdoor
air. This technique, or trick if you must, tries to give the reader the
idea that because a stove that emits all its smoke indoors, it cannot be
made clean enough with a chimney to produce an outdoor PM2.5 level that is
acceptable. Key to this untruth is the claim that stoves with chimney
cannot be clean burning (no technological improvement is possible) and that
they leak so much smoke from the stove that the IAQ problem will persist at
least in a modeled fraction of kitchens that is above some arbitrary level.

If you did not follow this last point, have a look at how the WHO?s
exposure model works. The estimate that there are really good and bad
kitchens and stoves and the model is set up to always estimate that some
combination of bad kitchens and stoves exist, therefore there will always
be ?failing? combinations. These may not exist at all, but they exist in
the Monte Carlo Simulations so by gum they probably exist in real life.

To always have some kitchen-stove combinations fail, they heroically assume
that an average 25% of the emissions leak from chimney stoves, and that
there are no clean burning fires in all stoves fitted with chimneys.
Because it is so obvious that a reasonably clean burning stove with a
reasonable chimney such as is found throughout Asia would leak basically
zero smoke into the room (while burning a solid fuel) some excuse has to be
invented not to do the obvious. I say obvious because millions, or billions
of people across Asia and North America already figured this out and put
chimneys on their heating and cooking stoves. This invention apparently
didn?t reach California.

?These new improved biomass stoves vary enormously, but none have yet been
shown to sufficiently reduce exposure to PM2.5 to comply with the WHO's
Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality (Smith and Sagar, 2014).?

Finally some relief, thanks to Fresh Air (Netherlands), Dr Talant
Sooronbaev and the World Bank?s Kyrgyzstan heating stove pilot programme.
Together they definitively showed that solid fuel stoves can be locally
made and installed by local contractors and supplied with local fuels and
operated by local people and that the exposure to PM2.5 can be reduced from
a 24 hr level of 200-800 ?g/m3 to 10-40. (There is a range because even
walking through the house with boots on can raise the level to 100 for a
few minutes. A lot of cooking creates an exposure well over 40 so we have
to be at least a little realistic about what constitutes a ?health
protective? level.)

Good, then. It is settled. The claim that solid fuels are not being able to
be burned cleanly enough to protect health is definitely disproven.

The starting and finishing positions of this paper needs to be corrected in
light of the clear evidence contradicting them.

Regards
Crispin

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