[Stoves] Project Drawdown (Anil, Paul, Ron)

[Nikhil Desai]

Paul:

Jeff Gilliard is no longer at Drawdown. I tried to get his whereabouts, but
was twice rebuffed by the Drawdown contact. As with every other climate
report, I imagine they have been bombarded by ideologues of all kinds.

About Noorie's paper. I have been able to read material offered by Amazon
to "Look Inside" (pages 44 and 45 only).

I like the starting sentence "Preparing food is at the core of family,
culture, and community." Reminded me of Chef Jose Andres, and her of Rene
Redzepi, Alice Waters, Alain Ducasse, and Madhur Jaffrey. (I hadn't even
heard of the first three, so Noorie is obviously leagues ahead in thinking
about cooking, not just stoves.)

And I also liked her sentence in the middle - "Though cookstoves may seem
simple, taking them from concepts to reality is as much an art as cooking
itself."

The policy implications of these rather simple statements are profound,
namely, there needs to be a paradigm change. Physics has been stuffed down
our intellectual throats by fact-free, cook-free WBTs. (Even BAMG Stove
Performance Inventory Report prepared for GACC has insightful comments at
the end.)

She continues, "Family dynamics, from financing to education to gender
roles affect decisions about stoves, which must meet a suite of needs.
These include preparing traditional dishes in traditional pots and
achieving desired flavor; working with locally available fuels; saving on
the cost of fuels or time spent in obtaining it; making cooking easy,
efficient, safe, and, of course, affordability. ... When it comes to
stoves, context really counts... Locally attuned, human-centered designs
are most likely to win hearts and minds and shift prevailing habits -- and,
most important, majority share of cooking time."

Amen. Context matters. Human environments are difficult to define without
family dynamics. and "locally attuned" means not just relative fuel prices
but availability and quality of water, implements for other household
chores and allocation of these chores, availability and quality of food
ingredients,

The concluding section "IMPACT" says: "As of 2014, clean cookstoves
comprised just 1.3 percent of the addressable market. If adoption grows to
16 percent by 2050, reduction in emissions will amount to 15.8 Gigatons of
carbon dioxide."

I don't know what the "addressable market" is and how its size/location
changes with population growth and urbanization, economic growth, but I
suspect the 15.8 gtCO2 is CO2e with 100-year GWPs and integrated over 35
years without discounting.

If that is all that is considered "reasonable, conservative" by the
Drawdown project, the fault, alas, lies not with Paul Hawken but with us.
Almost nobody "out there" hears of TLUDs and char-making cookstoves because
gas and electricity are promoted by the "implementation science" folks at
GACC and Berkeley.

---

I wish she had mentioned Anil's proposal of Rural Restaurants, cafeterias
for the working poor (or the elderly), in my words Sodexho for the Poor, or
what used to be Sholl's
<http://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/18/us/a-fight-for-honesty-purity-and-veal.html>
in Washington, DC.

To me, the future of cookstoves, especially solid fuel cookstoves, is
OUTSIDE the homes. This revolution began some 150 years ago in the US
(after the Civil War) and around the world, including Indian cities that I
am familiar with and all the vintage tourist places in Africa and Asia I
have visited. Cooking paradigms changed then, without any GACC or WHO. But
the "improved cookstoves" paradigm, also begun around then (according to
Joel Darmstadter and some data in US Patents Office), got a second life in
India and Africa after independence, as venerable experts rushed in where
angels feared to tread.

Now, I am always skeptical of global models, and can sometimes predict the
outcomes if I am just given the set of assumptions. So, much as I support
Ron and Paul's demands to look at the assumptions in Drawdown, I don't
think much will come of it. The next edition of Drawdown, if there is any,
will not get a tenth of the attention this one has; the world would have
moved on, and these debates will remain confined to techies like us who can
argue to the end of our lives.

I happen to think "reversing" climate change is a rich people's hobby. I
changed my attention from "mitigation" to "resilience", where I advocated
the transition to modern energy including by use of better biomass stoves
(using a picture Jim Jetter kindly allowed me to use.)

I will happily support your queries and review assumptions. To begin with,
20-year GWP and 5% "real" discount rate can make a huge difference in
ranking. Besides, income and cost assumptions should be used with a
distribution reflecting actual historical experience where possible.
Expanding the range of biomass technologies, and modeling land/water use
changes in conjunction with food/energy/biochar/BECCS system interactions
(regionally constrained) should give very different rankings. As I referred
to earlier, power system operations rules are also key to fuel rankings in
new capacity choice, around the world (rich countries will have a higher
replacement demands and smarter grids).

Nikhil
 -------------------------------------------------------



On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 6:01 PM, Paul Anderson <psanders at ilstu.edu> wrote:

> To all, especially Anil, Ron, Nikhil, Andrew, and Jock,
>
> Andrew, Porject Drawdown certainly has a strong cookstoves component (and
> char-producing TLUD stoves solidly links the stove and biochar components
> that are being discussed.).
>
> Anil, please enlist your daughter into this discussion.   She has very
> valuable first-hand info about how the calculations were made.   I am sure
> that she will be interested in these discussions.   Are there other
> contributing authors who can be contacted?   Can Jock help with this,
> please?
>
> Ron and Nikhil, we are interested in ALL the assumptions of the 100
> technologies (reduced to 80),  BUT we need to do our focused and strongest
> work about the fields that we best understand:  cookstoves and biochar.
>
> WHY???   Cookstoves are in position number 21 (just behind nuclear), and
> biochar is number 72 (I think).   We need to re-assess the input data and
> see if the GigaTonne numbers (and rank numbers) should be changed.   Hawkin
> clearly emphasized that the caluculations were intentionally favoring
> CONSERVATIVE results.   We are not trying to recalculate in favorable
> term.   We want to be conservative and still show that cookstoves and
> biochar have been UNDERESTIMATED by significant amounts.
>
> Cookstoves:  Just the TLUD realistic potential should move stoves from
> position #21 to perhaps #12 or higher.   AND factor in the IN ADDITION TO
> THE GT REDUCTIONS, there are so many ADDITIONAL benefits.   ALSO, the cost
> of accomplishing the cookstove goals is far less than the costs of many of
> the other technologies!!!    We want to see a $ per GT number for
> cookstoves.  Stoves could rank in the top 5 easiest and most cost effective
> technologies for the desired Drawdown!!!!
>
> Biochar:  Similar statements as above.
> Also, Ron wrote:
>
>  As an example, why did they assume that biochar would only be associated
> with food (and not energy nor materials nor water quality nor fertilizer
> and irrigation savings - much less CDR [carbon dioxide removal] or simply
> improving land values)?  All are taking place today - with favorable
> economics.
>
> Okay.  Said well.   Now substantiate each one of those (and other)
> "claims".
>
> Project Drawdown has provided us with two opportunities to reply:  stoves
> and biochar.  If we do not develop this situation into an opportunity to
> press our points of view to the larger world-wide community, we will be
> missing a golden opportunity.
>
> We want our info to be into the news.   We want to be at the panel
> discussions of Drawdown technologies.
>
> 1st, do you agree with this approach?
>
> 2nd,  if there is sufficient "yes", then we need to get started.   And
> that means getting more info about how the calculations have been made.
>
> Suggestion:  the key word is Drawdown.   Please use that word in your
> subject lines IF you are writing about this topic, and then and a few words
> to describe you subject better.   Examples:  Drawdown - stoves -
> general     or    Drawdown - Biochar - data
>
> In some ways, this is a test of our abilities to use the Listservs for
> advancement beyond talking to ourselves.
>
> Paul
>
> Doc  /  Dr TLUD  /  Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
> Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu
> Skype:   paultlud    Phone: +1-309-452-7072 <(309)%20452-7072>
> Website:  www.drtlud.com
>
> -
>
>
On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 9:26 AM, nari phaltan <nariphaltan at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am happy to inform stovers that my daughter Dr. Noorie Rajvanshi is the
> author of three chapters (clean cook stoves, perennial crops and biomass)
> in the Drawdown report.
>
> Anil Rajvanshi
>
>
>
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