[Stoves] CO2 drawdown (Re:Jock)

Sun Feb 5 23:38:27 CST 2017

Dear Cecil, 

Your application of "Occam' razor" below is most elegant. Anyone who has developed a stove where the cooks/users were involved right at the start understands what you are trying to communicate. I am fortunate to have my cooks, potters and locals use various versions of the eco-Kalan and Whirly Pinay TLUD stoves to cook their meals throughout the stoves' development . Without malice to any one, I can say your path to developing a stove for the poor is RIGHT. THANK YOU. 

Sincerely, 

Rebecca Vermeer 

From: cec1863 at gmail.com 
To: "DISCUSSION OF BIOMASS COOKING STOVES" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>, "DISCUSSION OF BIOMASS COOKING STOVES" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org> 
Cc: "Nigel Pemberton-Pigott" <nigel1 at outlook.com>, "Xavier Brandao" <xvr.brandao at gmail.com>, "Laurent Durix" <ldurix at worldbank.org>, "Nikhil Desai" <ndesai at alum.mit.edu>, "Zhou Yuguang" <zhouyuguang at china.com>, "Samer Abdelnour" <samer.abdelnour at gmail.com> 
Sent: Sunday, February 5, 2017 12:20:39 AM 
Subject: Re: [Stoves] CO2 drawdown (Re:Jock) 

Dear CPP and Ron: 

Remember 'Occam's razor'‎? It holds that the simplest and most elegant explanation of an observed effect is to be preferred over a more complicated multi-variate explanation. It is a trusted rule of thumb for scientists. It is, therefore, smart to keep our stove science as simple as possible. 

IMO we need to stop overloading stove research with dystopian and utopian visions that frequently get confused with world wide Crusades for Green power and against catastropic anthropogenic global warming. When domestic stoves are treated as part of the war against global warming, urban pollution, and respitory health and funded with CDM carbon subsidies, it is a short step to motivate big omnibus "Manhattan Project" sized progams and interventions. Thus poor people living at the BoP and their stoves are in danger of becoing pawns in the energy wars of the early 21st Century‎. 

It is essential as Nikhil has repeatedly explained to separate the global from the local spheres of action. When biomass stoves become too closely associated stove with people struggling at the BOP, stove activists run a definite risk of politicization. This conflation of small stoves with partisan politics can weaken the independence of stove science from partisan politics. Political meddling and funds can distort science and cause both models of reality and the metrics used to probe it to change‎. 

Remember Lestor Brown admonition: think globally but act locally? I think he got it upside down or maybe front to back. The search for a more perfect biomass stove by making more and better use of the sciences of combustion, heat transfer, and the atmospheric pollution starts at the universal level and invents a high efficiency low emission stove from the top down. 

The appropriate technology approach starts with the local ethnoscience of stoves and fuels and then tries to marry the local ethnoscience of traditional stoves with the sophisticated sciences of chemistry, physics, materials, atmospheric pollution, etc, The aim of the AT approach to stove design and fabrication is to discover a middle ground where both culture and science cohabit, cross fertilize and raise up resilient progeny. 

There may be hidden agendas driving high level stove strategists and globally oriented environmental activists. There is always a risk that nations and NGO stove programs will become unwitting pawns of monumental propganda campaigns or scams organized around saving our beautiful little blue green planet from anthropogenic ecocide. A politicized small stove program is likely be politicized from the top down. 

There is a similar economy principle operating at the heart of the search for more sustainable and affordable stove development strategies. This "economy principle" applied to the mass implementation of big stove rollouts means that interdependent multi-factoral complexity becomes the enemy of the rapid establishment and diffusion of innovationof small stoves. 

Thus, where big changes in fuel preparation and the types of fuel used for cooking are introduced in addition to other changes in stove operator habits, the degree of difficulty in changing the behaviors required to successfully operate a new stove technology becomes much more difficult to motivate and institutionalize. 

It is my contention that treating biomass stoves as charcoal kilns as well as cooking and heating devices will predictably complicate and very likely delay the acceptance of TLUD stoves, unless there is an existisg demand for charcoal as a fuel or as a soil improvement agent. The creation of a new demand for charcoal where it does not already exist will pose a major obstacle to the acceptance of a more fuel efficient TLUD stove. 

If stove buyers and users are more impressed by big reductions in biomass consumption than by increased charcoal production, the only way to turn the charcoal production into a socio-economic benefit in the minds of local stove users is to create a reliable local demand for the surplus charcoal produced by a TLUD. 

It is helpful, even empowering, when the stove buyer/user acquires the tools they need to carry out their own cost benefit assessment of alternative stoves. This is a bottom up cost benefit assessment by indigenous stove users which has absolutely nothing to do with the cost benefit assessment performed by a stove testing center or stove testing expert working for the World Bank, or a climate action NGO advocating CO2 reduction at any cost. 

The argument between Ron and Crispin and others appears to have no scientific resolution at their level of abstraction and discourse. Therefore, the end user has the final word here. All CPP and Ron can do is offer the buyers and users alternative stove technologies and products to choose between. Oranges and apples or lemons. 

Our job as proponents of particular stoves offering different functional benefits and costs, strengths and weaknesses. When comparing and scoring a series of different stove technologies and products, it is necessary to invent a trusted meta methodology that is capable of objectively assessing the performance of different stoves against an agreed upon performance indicators. These performance indicators can be defined and operationalized from the perspective of the buyer/user from the top down (stove experts view) or from the bottom up (the stove owner-operator's view). Both types of assessment are required, but in my view the bottom up stove user's assessment is more powerful - and therefore outranks - the top down stove scientific assessment of stove performance. 

As a rule I normally favour those stove technologies which earn the highest approval ratings from actual stove users rather than assessments given by stove testers and other top feeding professionals stovistas. 

The stoves given the highest positive scores from stove users on +/- 10 dimensions of stove performance would be provisionally selected as the best performing stove among an initial cohort of say 10 different stoves. The higher the score achieved by a stove means that in a given target community the stove in question is judged by end users as to have delivered the best performance and been awarded the highest performance score or grade. 

Our job becomes simpler if we construct stove use tests that allow stove users/buyers to assess the performance of competing products based upon their cooking experience in the simulated or actual home kitchens and the space heating performance in simulated or their own houses ...and then ask them to rate the performance of different stoves along both specialized as well as generalized dimensions of stove performance. 

I hope I am not reinventing the old controlled cooking test. (CCT) and the kitchen performance test (KPT). What I am attempting to think through right now is how best to empower stove users and their stove performance preferences by placing operator's skills and his/her culturally generated preferences at the center of the evaluation of the Improved Stoves. 

>From my point of view the first step in the stove assessment process is the careful documentation and quantification of the stove operating habits, skills and food and fuel culture of the cook of the traditionally dominant stove in a given community.‎ Initially it makes sense to put the cook at the center of the stove evaluation process. 

Once we replace the stove scientist in the lab with the cook and stove user, the focus shifts away from standardized efficiency and emission testing and concentrates on the preferences and patterns of stove use by human operators. When the cook's skills, stove performance, and food/fuel preferences are the primary focus of stove testing, the stove is now tested in terms of its cultural performance: how well do different stoves cook the full range of culturally valued foods with the actually available mix of biomass fuels (with variable moisture). 

The improvement of efficiency and emission performance takes place within a matrix of environmental, materials, fabrication skills and production capacities, operator skills and non-negotiable demands about cultural dishes and foods, cooking times, fire power, the ethno-science of fuel woods, number of pots, and other kinds of stove work. These operator preferences and culturally preferred performances "trump" the efficiency and emission performance of improved scientifically designed stoves. 

The improvement of E&E of a modernized biomass stove must take place within the shell of the old or the performance of the dominant traditional stove. My idea is to start the stove revolution by smuggling radical improvements in efficiency and emission reductions without the stove user having to change his or her stove skills and operating behaviors very much or at all. 

It's a sneaky kind of stove Marxism where there is no anti-thesis...... only the thesis and then an upwardly spiraling syn-thesis. I do not completely believe in the ever evolving revolutionary synthesis. Eventually both the inner guts - the combustion dynamics and the material forms of biomass stoves and the outer cultural "plasma" and behavior forms of biomass stoves will have to reciprocally transform. Within a couple of hundred years both the old material forms and the soft behaviors which together constitue a fully functioning stove/operator/fuel/fabricator system will totally disappear and undreamed futuristic stoves, fuel sources, utensils, cusines will evolve to take the place of the old cooking technologies. 

In search and service, 

Cecil 

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone. 
From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott 
Sent: Saturday, February 4, 2017 11:09 AM 
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves 
Reply To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves 
Subject: Re: [Stoves] CO2 drawdown (Re:Jock) 

Dear Ron 

“ [RWL: You misunderstand Jock (a good e-mail friend , who like me has worked on policy matters in DC). CO2 drawdown is a responsibility of developed countries - especially the USA. The cheapest way by far is to pay (fairly) rural inhabitants of developing countries for producing and using biochar..” 

Why do you think people in developing countries should do something you want just because it is ‘cheapest’? What will you do when they tell you to get stuffed? Bury your own charcoal. 

Stove imperialism is bad enough without tacking on charcoal imperialism. Read the Kyoto document: developing countries have on responsibility to follow western fashions. 

If you promoted charcoal as a fuel, especially pelleted char dust, you could create millions of permanent jobs in deep rural areas. Start that and people will join in numbers. 

Regards 

Crispin 

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