[Stoves] "Those of us who believe that the WBT is critical to stove improvement"

Nikhil Desai pienergy2008 at gmail.com
Fri Dec 15 22:56:53 CST 2017


Xavier:

If there is no harm alleged, who would bother? I did not ask you for a
proof, merely an allegation that you can state as an allegation. Everybody
is entitled to an allegation based on reasonable knowledge.

But whose problem is it that WBT gives results that are unreliable? Where
did you ever see a piece of regulation that says cookstove testing protocol
has to give reliable results?

As I have told you, WBT of the American variety has no legal authority.
It's a toy EPA contractors borrowed from earlier USAID contractors and kept
revising it the way they wished, to obtain measurements for some metrics of
their interest - fuel efficiency, CO, PM2.5 - in order to publish their
papers in peer-reviewed journals.

Since all the "peers" of interest were familiar with WBT, they likely went
along with convenient pretense of science.

I was told - I don't remember by whom, maybe I read it somewhere - that EPA
made GACC - i.e., the UNF, an EPA contractor that is an opaque,
unaccountable pretentious private agent in the business of making money in
ways blessed by convenient peers - the "custodian"of WBT.

What is UNF comptence, and what is EPA's jurisdiction, for this transfer of
custody?

None, and none was required because all that EPA wanted to do was spend
some research funds on US contractors.

The Emperor Pretending Authority has no clothes. EPA is lawless. It has
gone rogue.

Which is convenient because its contractors can keep on publishing results
that WHO then uses to cook up the Global Burden of Disease from Household
Air Pollution, see for example here
<https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1476-069X-12-77?site=ehjournal.biomedcentral.com>
.

Then comes the real monkey business of "international standards". Some key
documents in this exercise - here
<http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es301693f> and here
<https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/15-09852/> - are based on WBT in the lab.

So, whatever was limited to merely academic matter of publishing papers was
transferred to a policy-relevant exercise of IWA to TC-285.

You know I don't find the Lima Consensus, the IWA or the ISO TC-285 of any
value in testing of stoves because I think the metrics themselves are at
fault.

Whoever has a theory that higher efficiency or lower PM2.5 hourly emission
rate has a causal predictability for all the alleged problems with solid
fuels - resource depletion, disease incidence, climate change, and
incidence of sexual violence - is merely parroting groupthink, a convenient
ideology for raising money and spending it on rich theorists of rich
theories.

There is no evidence that efficiency and hourly PM2.5 emission rates had
anything to do with these ills in the past. Yes, I can attribute anything
to anything and get away with it so long as my pals agree and we all parrot
this attributability. But attributable doesn't mean causal and even if it
did, the reverse causality may not exist.

So, to close the argument on this on my side: a) WBT doesn't matter, except
to certain vested interests, and past WBT results are of no value when it
comes to designing cookstoves for the future; and b) there is no theory of
change in the IWA metrics and Tiers.  In any case, all this is a means to
make money in the name of the poor. That is what Washington DC is suited
for.

Now my answers to your question, between *** below.

·         There’s a loophole in the emission testing system of Volkswagen.
It allows cheating. But, you say we have no way to clearly know how
emissions are harmful to the population. So, we shouldn’t care if the
engine is clean or not, and if the test is unreliable or not, because we
don’t know the effects of emissions on health anyways.

So should we change the system or not? Should we ask Volkswagen to use a
testing system that is reliable?

*** The comparison is invalid. There is a legally established authority for
setting emission standards for auto vehicles in the context of legally set
standards for ambient air quality. I have repeatedly told  you that what
goes on in the name of "clean cookstoves" has no legal authority nor a
theory of improving household air quality. There are no baseline data -
other than spotty measurements collected in the WHO database of studies -
for household air quality anywhere in the world. What WHO did is simply
slap on assumed concentrations by age (up to 5 and 25+) and sex to all
people supposed to be using solid fuels for cooking (which too is another
model estimate with no data on quantity and quality of fuels consumed or
emission rates). You don't want to acknowledge that all this is a charade,
only to satisfy people engaged in it and snowed by it so they can keep
publishing papers and making speeches to raise money. Including from Gates
Foundation and HHS. I have yet to see any argument that suggests to me that
I am on the wrong track here. ***

·         The NASA realize some of its calculations basically find that 1 +
1 = 3. Those calculations are actually present in many of their research
projects, for various technologies. But they have no way to know how much
impact it had on the projects, because the projects are still going, there
are technologies being developed, all is seemingly quite fine.

Should the mistake be corrected or not?

*** That is for NASA to decide. Who finds the error and how? Either there
is a whistleblower or the NASA Inspector General finds it. Once the
information is in the open, anybody with a standing can take NASA to court
if it doesn't correct the error. The point is, process matters. Legal
authority to do something exists, and there is a framework for transparency
and accountability. Just remember the shuttle disaster and how Richard
Feynman showed to us all that the O-ring was not up to withstanding
extremely cold temperatures. Here - in the case of EPA as well as its
contractors such as GACC and ANSI, there is no legal authority - under US
law, that is - for the use of WBT or anything else. I haven't even asked
John Mitchell at EPA if there are internal evaluation report of its
cookstoves program and contractors, but I don't need to. GACC is proof
plenty of a lawless, opaque, unaccountable entity. Anybody in this game can
do anything, and of course you too can complain; I strongly support your
complaint. But to me, there is no point bothering about reliability of WBT
in predicting efficiency with actual fuels (not oven-dried wood of a
particular type, chopped in a particular way) and actual use (actual cooks
preparing actual meals or heating water and kitchens). Who cares and why? I
have yet to see anybody in the manufactured stove distribution business to
claim that s/he relied on WBT to design and sell his/her stove. The reason
is simple - they all know what a racket lab testing is, and rely on it to
get some marketing edge or some money from carbon credits. S/he doesn't
have to guarantee any performance in terms of fuel savings or disease
incidence (which is where BAMG steps in to sell aDALYs). Not that users
rely that much on promised fuel savings or can do anything if the price or
collection cost of fuel changes. Stove/fuel choice is dependent on a wide
range of factors, above all the cook's ease of adapting to new technology.
But real cook and cooking has not been the interest of WBT faithful. I said
as much 34 years ago and haven't found any reason to change my opinion. In
short, this is an invalid comparison. You, sir, are taking the drama as if
it were a real life event. No, it is not. What you are observing in TC-285
is, as far as I can tell (only from the first DIS), shenanigans. Won't
amount to anything except cooking up excuses for Gold Standard and Goldman
Sachs. There is no historical baseline for anything anywhere, nor a future
baseline, and nobody is going to be able to measure actual performance
except by spending loads of money on M&E consultants. Again, what I see is
all about making money in the name of the poor. If it were ESMAP or World
Bank or USAID, they are bound by certain process rules for spending public
money and have the authority to do so. EPA and its contractors simply have
no place in poor people's kitchens. They may all pretend high morals and
noble intentions; I for one don't care what makes rich people richer but
does nothing for the poor - not even move money. (I of course know GACC's
projects on "improved" charcoal stoves. I don't know what lab test protocol
they used, what promises of reduced disease incidence or deforestation they
made to whom and over what period. All that can be made public for people
to judge. When it comes to TC-285, only the final product would show.
Whether it is used by anybody is anybody's guess. ***

I have an other question for both of you:

·         How do you measure the impact of the unreliability of the WBT? Do
you have a methodology?

 *** Why should I care? I have told you the primary performance metric I
have is usability, pleasing the cook enough for her/him to make a change,
for whatever reason. Then and only then it makes any sense, for academic
reasons if nothing else, to measure actual performance against some
baseline performance. If there is no point in higher fuel efficiency or
lower PM2.5 hourly emission rates, why should I care that WBT results are
unreliable? Again, the limitations and pitfalls of WBT have been known for
decades, and EPA contractors' generating newer and newer versions of WBT
does not mean the fundamental conceit of metrics selected for experts'
satisfaction. All this talk of M&E methodology for a check against promised
"results" begs the question, what results does a cook want? We have this
health fascism that no solid fuel cookstoves are "truly health protective"
and that "stacking must not be permitted because the dose-response curve is
non-linear at low levels of PM2.5".  It survives because there is big money
behind it, not to speak of IHME/WHO deceit. Frankly, my dear, I don't give
a damn. This is a cruel joke on my sisters and nieces worldwide. ***

No personal offense intended and I hope you don't take any. I agree
something has to be done. To me, the first step is to stop an end to the
TC-285 pretense. It is immoral.

Nikhil


On Fri, Dec 15, 2017 at 4:45 PM, Xavier Brandao <xvr.brandao at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear Nikhil, Ron,
>
>
>
> Nikhil, this is probably the third time you are asking me that same
> question:
>
> « What are the proofs that the WBT did harm anybody? »
>
>
>
> And my answer hasn’t changed, so I’ll tell you for the third time: « I
> have no proof, there are no proofs, because it has never been studied ».
>
> Ask me that same question again, I’ll answer the same thing.
>
>
>
> If you have 30.5 million dollars from the Gates Foundation to do a 5-year
> longitudinal study, please be my guest and lead the way.
>
> And let’s wait for the report conclusions to contemplate if maybe we
> should act.
>
>
>
> In the absence of that, we need to think carefully, and act carefully. But
> we need to act.
>
>
>
> Nikhil, Ron, it’s my turn to ask you questions:
>
> ·         There’s a loophole in the emission testing system of
> Volkswagen. It allows cheating. But, you say we have no way to clearly know
> how emissions are harmful to the population. So, we shouldn’t care if the
> engine is clean or not, and if the test is unreliable or not, because we
> don’t know the effects of emissions on health anyways.
>
> So should we change the system or not? Should we ask Volkswagen to use a
> testing system that is reliable?
>
> ·         The NASA realize some of its calculations basically find that 1
> + 1 = 3. Those calculations are actually present in many of their research
> projects, for various technologies. But they have no way to know how much
> impact it had on the projects, because the projects are still going, there
> are technologies being developed, all is seemingly quite fine.
>
> Should the mistake be corrected or not?
>
>
>
> I have an other question for both of you:
>
> ·         How do you measure the impact of the unreliability of the WBT?
> Do you have a methodology?
>
>
>
> Best,
>
>
> Xavier
>   <#m_1991595890816289277_DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>
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