[Stoves] REVISED Re: Fwd: News: On-the-ground research reveals true impact of cook-stove emissions in India

[Nikhil Desai]

Ron:

1. I never offered Grant's thesis as proof there is no proven link contrary
to your assertion that "there are serious health hazards to traditional
cookstove use." Grant mentions "link", which to me means very little. If
there is no causality, what's the policy implication? Anybody can link
anything to anything else; with a million dollars, I will even show that
India's rate of sexual violence by strangers is linked with Modi's LPG
policies.

Grant opened my eyes with his thesis and in particular his reference to
Ahuja's paper that there might have been no robust basis for emission rates
and concentrations in rural households' woodburning devices reported in the
literature till then. He left the question of emission rates and disease
incidence rates aside, neither proving or disproving the alleged "link".

Basically, he said the emperor didn't know how to choose clothes and put
them on.

Which was one of the reasons why, soon thereafter (circa 2001/2), I
dismissed the idea of using aDALYs to monetize "health benefits" from
low-emissions stoves. There was no credible baseline on emissions past or
future, nor on DALYs past or future. Case closed.

Only an idiot would dispute "there are serious health hazards to
traditional cookstove use." The question is, can this risk be quantified,
and has WHO in combination with IHME done a credible job? I don't believe
so. And even if it did - the glib and the gullible make a lasting
partnership - it takes quite a bit of gall for WHO to put out the HFC
Guidelines - Solid Fuels. It is the TC-285 PM2.5 Tiers that I find
unacceptable, irrelevant, and counter-productive; they are not based on any
data nor any theory of quantified disease incidence from hourly average
PM2.5 emission rates.

2.  I find it curious that  you find this sentence of mine curious: "4.
The reason I don't like the IWA metrics of efficiency and PM2.5 is, there
is no statement of the problem and there is no theory of change. Prove me
the alleged worldwide deforestation and desertification, climate change,
ill health, and sexual violence caused by inefficient and smoky use of
solid fuels." (RWL4:   Please cite something anybody ever said to support
that really curious argument.)

The burden of proof is on you and all those who have been involved in this
drama of Lima Consensus, IWA and TC-285. What are "international standards"
going to do and when, for whom? Whose problem and what problem would they
solve, and what is the theory of causality not just in physical aspect -
some material from solid fuels being ingested and lodged into people's
lungs (along with any other such ingestions) and causing some chronic
non-communicable disease like CVD - but also a theory of behavioral
causality.

The myth of "international standards" to deliver impacts on forest
resources, health, climate change, sexual violence has to be dispensed
with. For all too long stovers have fooled donors with such myths and
failed to convince those who matter - the cooks. I would much rather have
some field testing of fuel x stove combinations that are found acceptable
by the cooks (called test marketing) for a long list of metrics that stove
program evaluators have identified as being relevant to adaptability, then
tweak the product design as needed to establish a strong market pitch.

In short, identify the customers and the fuels, stop treating a stove and a
lung as oxidizing machines, and get funds for what I might call "applied
R&D" and product engineering. Is that wrong? If not, and since there is not
an iota of evidence as to support the importance of "international
standards", it is time to call off this circus.

I just found something from a letter to NEJM editor nearly three years ago:

"Evidence for the relationship between household air pollution and
cardiovascular disease, unlike that for other risk factors, including
ambient air pollution, does not currently derive from studies of disease
but from studies of intermediate effect 4
<http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1412846?query=TOC#ref4-SA2> and
directly linking evidence across four major types of combustion air
pollution: smoking, household air pollution, secondhand tobacco smoke, and
ambient air pollution. 5
<http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1412846?query=TOC#ref5-SA2> "
(look up the cites).

That is, the evidence for HAP-CVD is not based on data on ingestion and
disease.


Because there are no data on HAP ingestion, nor on specific disease
incidence profiles of those exposed. It is all merrymaking with
assumptions.

Speaking of which, make merry this time of the year!

Nikhil





On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 8:21 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongretlarson at comcast.net>
wrote:

> List and ccs
>
> 1.  There is one happy sentence below, where “you” is me:  “*If you have
> a problem with that, there is nothing more I can say. "*
>
> 2.  That was preceded by this  ”* Attribution is not causality. And
> attributable is not avoidable. Even if there is a causation from pollution
> exposure to disease and death, it does not mean that the reverse causation
> occurs in the same quantitative manner. These are different cohorts and
> there are confounding factors. *
> I do have (different) problems with all parts of this, but especially the
> first two short sentences,  so hopefully Nikhil will now stop talking about
> WHO.
>
> I’m trying to finish the long list from Xavier -  on real material of
> import to this list - WBT test procedure validity.
>
> 3.  Although I am not choosing,to say anything on the rest of Nikhil’s
> long response,  I disagree with almost everything there also, especially a
> 1999 paper by an expert (Dr. Kirk Smith) who also disagrees with everything
> claimed by Nikhil.  Again - bringing up this paper is “curious”.
>
> 4.  Being a topic of my choosing, I ask Nikhil for a third time to comment
> on the statements in the Washington Post about death statistics due to
> forest fire smoke.  Reason - it is a very similar topic, with attribution
> and causality claimed by four named experts.  I claim avoidability is
> possible.  I believe the health statistics raise all the same issues where
> Nikhil differs so much from WHO and EPA.  I say the issues are the same for
> households or entire air basins  Remember the issue also is whether forest
> fire smoke is worse than that from coal plants - which all but a few on
> this list agree are themselves pretty horrendous.
> I am claiming that if the four experts are correct, then Nikhil and
> Crispin are wrong - about WHO and EPA.
>
> Ron
>
>
> On Dec 17, 2017, at 4:00 PM, Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Ron:
>
> I was on the road when an incomplete response went out in error. Below a
> completed response, with the new text in purple (if it comes through)
> additions to the previous text (which is in black).
>
> The address you have for Grant seems to be an old one. Also, I believe
> Boiling Post stopped some time back.
>
> __________
> .
> Dear Ron:
>
> I said no such thing. What nonsense.
>
> Grant's PhD thesis - as I remembered it and as I confirmed it last night
> when I gave you the link to it - was about protocols of measurement, not
> about health consequences. He says right in the beginning, "Current
> knowledge of emissions from stoves and how to gauge emission levels is
> severely limited."
>
> Soon after, in Section 1.2.2 he elaborates "the difficulty of measuring
> emissions from stoves used by rural poor", citing Ahuja (whom I have known
> since 1983).
>
> These difficulties continue to date, and confound all actual field
> measurements of emission rates and concentrations; there aren't many such
> measurements anyway, and IHME goes on killing millions of people by
> assumption. (If, say, 4 million of some 50 million deaths worldwide in 2012
> were attributed to HAP, those people had lived some 200 million
> person-years. Many diseases attributed to HAP are long-term, and
> interpreting attributability as causality would require exposure and
> disease evidence over these 200 million person-years. As a matter of fact,
> there is not a single death - leave alone 4 million - that has had HAP
> exposure tracked over a lifetime. Not even for a child dying at age 2 from
> disease attributed to HAP.)
>
> Since "risk factor" attribution of "premature deaths" and DALYs is
> basically an allocation game as agreed to among several hundred public
> health professionals worldwide, I won't ask WHO to identify even one death
> caused by HAP. But I would certainly want to know how DALYs for cohorts
> dead were attributed to HAP based on actual measurements of exposures and
> diseases for representative populations.
>
> So, ignoring Grant's caution about the inherent difficulty of measuring
> emissions and concentrations - I don't believe he proposed any protocol,
> just that he used the 1985 WBT for his tests - let us look for emission
> measurements as reported.
>
> This is where I remembered Kirk Smith (1999) "Indoor Air Pollution"
> (Pollution Management in Focus, Discussion Note #4, World Bank). Here I
> produce his table from there:
>
>
> <image.png>
>
>
>  That is, as of mid-1999, there were 27 studies over about 600 households.
> I don't now remember which ones of these I might have known - there is no
> direct reference to any summary report - but I do remember none at the time
> lasted more than a few days with the possible exception of Smith's famous
> Guatemala study. (It might have started around then).
>
> Such spotty studies do not providee generalizable conclusions of
> concentrations and exposures.
>
> I remember seeing a more recent review - circa 2012, perhaps under the
> World Bank/ESMAP - of such emission and concentration measurements, and of
> course there is a compilation of some 150+ such studies under the WHO
> "emission database" for HAP as of 2011. I do not claim to have read many of
> them, but I do remember some other paper from Kirk Smith - or in this 2012
> paper from the World Bank - that these field measurements did not have a
> consistent protocol, equipment varied, and so did durations - from a few
> days to six months or at most a year; the only multi-year monitoring was in
> Smith's Guatemala project.
>
> There are serious problems in using such disparate studies and cooking up
> "risk factors", though that is what public health folks do. As a policy
> analyst, I do not find this much of an "evidence base" no matter that it
> might be claimed "the best that science could do."
>
> I have no problem accepting that emissions lead to disease, just that not
> enough is known empirically about the pathways and quantification of
> relative risk.
>
> And I don't care what WHO/IHME think. Newer, more robust evidence on any
> risk factor would simply mean re-allocation of DALYs across risk factors.
> If nothing else, cohorts are changing: in 2010, say, some 50 million people
> died and in 2020, some 60 million people will die. The increase in deaths
> comes from both rich country nationals who have lived past 90 or 95, and
> from the increasing populations of developing countries.
>
> I have a very succinct proposition for you, namely,
>
> Attribution is not causality. And attributable is not avoidable. Even if
> there is a causation from pollution exposure to disease and death, it does
> not mean that the reverse causation occurs in the same quantitative manner.
> These are different cohorts and there are confounding factors.
>
> If you have a problem with that, there is nothing more I can say.
>
> It is this "reverse causation" part that led me to dismiss
> WHO's Guidelines for Household Fuel Combustion - Solid Fuels. It has no
> science behind it. Not only does WHO have no business messing with issues
> of energy or environmental policy, it has no intellectual justification for
> these "Guidelines" and worse, getting into ISO TC-285 exercise and
> proclaiming health benefits of Tier 4 rated stoves over Tier 3 rated stoves
> on the basis of lab measurements of hourly average emission rates using
> fictitious fuels and cooking fictitious meals.
>
> If you recall, I resisted Crispin's allegation that there is an
> ideological against coal and against all solid fuels.
>
> But there is a war; deliberate or mindless, I am not sure.
>
> When GACC and Gold Standard (with Goldman Sachs and C-Quest Capital) get
> together to market aDALYs, it is evident that the Tier 4 rating on PM2.5
> has one purpose - making money for these middlemen. Who knows, Gates
> Foundation will become a market-maker, giving $10,000 aDALY for the first
> LPG project in Ghana. The circus will run for decades.
>
> This, my friend, has nothing to do with poor people's health. It is all
> about making money. Secretively.
>
> I wish you all the success in the campaign to take away poor people's
> killer stoves and throw savior stoves at them, saving the earth in the
> bargain. Just please spare me the pretense of scientific quantification of
> health gains from use of LPG. World's oil and gas industries don't need
> such marketing help. Along with governments and international
> organizations, they too risk losing face in this song-and-dance when people
> realize they haven't been given a new lease on life, just convenient
> cooking.
>
> Mind you, I have nothing against convenient, modern cooking options for
> the poor. The best marketing for LPG is customers themselves - the
> technology sells itself, albeit with subsidies and under tight safety
> regulations.
>
> Because there isn't enough money for all the poor - the poorest always get
> the least - they will inevitably "stack" for economic reasons. Give them a
> choice of a lower-cost option using solid biomass, primary or processed,
> without regard for IWA Tier 4 label being "truly health protective".
> Support the poor's choice of "stacking". Enough merrymaking in the name of
> the health of the poor. We have known since cave days that wood smoke is
> unpleasant (though animal smoke and some leaf smoke may be pleasant and
> possibly good for our health).
>
>
>>
>> Nikhil
>>
>> On Dec 17, 2017, at 6:23 AM, Ronal W. Larson <rongretlarson at comcast.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Grant: cc list
>>
>> Sorry to bother you.
>>
>> I am following up on Crispin’s ”Sure” below.
>>
>>  My version of the argument is that you believe there are serious health
>> hazards to traditional cookstove use.  Nikhil, apparently supported by
>> Crispin, has offered your thesis as proof there is no proven link. (This is
>> my version of the argument; they can give another.)
>>
>> I recommend ignoring the tie below to SELF; that tie also makes no sense
>> re health issues related to smoke. Not sure why all the extraneous links
>> were felt necessary.
>>
>> I will separately forward my email preceding this one.  I quoted the
>> first two sentences which I thought were enough to disprove you were on
>> Nikhil and Crispin’s side of this argument.  Your sentences are:
>> * “Approximately 2,500 million people are exposed daily to emissions from
>> biofuel-burning cooking sites.   Respiratory disease, which is the
>> main cause of death in developing communities, is linked to these
>> emissions.”*
>>
>> The main question,  I think,  is whether somewhere in your thesis you
>> argue against these two sentences.   I assume Crispin and/or Nikhil will
>> correct me if I am asking the wrong question.
>>
>> I’m not sure why Crispin thinks I am lying when I say I have read your
>> thesis and asserts I won’t read what I asked Nikhil to supply two other
>> sentences from it.  Might you and I have ever communicated about your
>> thesis?
>>
>> I am now deciding how to ask his permission re his last line:  “… *you
>> shall hereinafter never again claim or even hint…* “   Any guidance?
>>
>> Ron
>>
>> ps  to stove list readers,  I urge visiting Grant’s site: www.hedon.info
>>  and signing up there for “Boiling Point” - perhaps the best journal on
>> these stove topics..
>>
>>
>>
>> Begin forwarded message:
>>
>> *From: *Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com>
>> *Subject: **Re: [Stoves] News: On-the-ground research reveals true
>> impact of cook-stove emissions in India*
>> *Date: *December 17, 2017 at 12:06:53 AM MST
>> *To: *"'Stoves (stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org)'" <
>> stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
>> *Reply-To: *Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <
>> stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
>>
>> Dear Ron
>>
>> If you can’t be bother to read one of the first PhD theses by someone
>> investigating stove test methods and impacts of emissions, how will you
>> even understand what Nikhil is talking about?
>>
>> [RWL3   I met Grant in Johannesburg in 2002 and probably read it then,
>> because I thought he looked quite knowledgeable  I stopped reading the
>> Thesis this time after the first two sentences…
>>
>>
>> As Nikhil has pointed out repeatedly, you can’t discuss what you have not
>> read.
>>
>> How about giving one or two sentences that supports your reading of this
>> thesis?
>>
>>
>> Why? You won’t read it for ideological reasons.
>>
>> Shall we waste Grant’s time by asking him whether he supports your
>> version of stove health issues?
>>
>>
>> Sure. Let’s ask him.
>>
>> I also can’t believe you are asking me to go Kirk’s website to prove
>> something on stove health issues that supports your non-causation, anti-WHO
>> theory.
>>
>>
>> Nikhil is not against the WHO. He is against untestable claims supported
>> by defective models and invalid arguments. So am I. That’s why we are both
>> critics of metrics that are selected on the basis of ideological
>> convenience or, in the case of the IWA,  ass-covering. Nikhil does not have
>> a theory of non-causation – you made that up – it is the WHO and EPA that
>> have an untested theory of causation. WHO’s theory is based on an other
>> theory of equitoxicity (EPA) and instant homogeneous distribution of PM
>> (Berkeley) from stove fires, something contradicted by the WHO’s own
>> internal discussions record and model testing.
>>
>> Those making claims have a responsibility to provide proof of their
>> theories of causation. Proposed mitigations require an articulated theory
>> of change so proofs can be made and effectiveness judged.  The theory that
>> replacing wood stoves with LPG stoves reduces exposure to PM2.5 in poor
>> communities has so far shown that the ambient PM2.5 dominates any exposure
>> to stove smoke. That is valuable, because it may be far cheaper and more
>> effective to control ambient air pollution that to supply KPG stoves and
>> fuel indefinitely.
>>
>> 4.  The reason I don't like the IWA metrics of efficiency and PM2.5 is,
>> there is no statement of the problem and there is no theory of change.
>> Prove me the alleged worldwide deforestation and desertification, climate
>> change, ill health, and sexual violence caused by inefficient and smoky use
>> of solid fuels.
>>
>>
>> RWL4:   Please cite something anybody ever said to support that really
>> curious argument.
>>
>>
>> Well I can do that easily. Here below is a recent appeal (yesterday) from
>> the Solar Electric Light Fund that has it all in one appeal for money:
>> Hollywood, hatred for Harvey Weinstein, AIDS, fear of the dark, women as
>> perpetual victims of perpetual predator men, saviour stoves, dreaded solid
>> fuels, leaving the foxhole to cross no man's land in desperate need of
>> water, hints of child molestation and abuse, and never forget to mention
>> that continent of despair: 'Africa', after all, it’s Christmas.
>>
>> Ron, you shall hereinafter never again claim or even hint that stoves are
>> not promoted using, “that really curious argument”. They are. It is not
>> ‘curious’, it is obscene.
>>
>> Regards
>> Crispin
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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