[Stoves] LPG India update and comments (Paul, Crispin)

[Nikhil Desai]

*Paul: *(a photocopy of Smith-Sagar OpEd attached)

1. Proposed subsidy for LPG in the coming year is about $2.4 billion an
that for kerosene about half as much. Budget 2017: Subsidy bill rises 3% to
Rs2.4 lakh crore
<http://www.livemint.com/Politics/h0H3mXXNzD41VgEe7SFpXO/Budget-2017-Subsidy-bill-rises-3-to-Rs24-lakh-crore.html>.
(Lakh is 1,00,000 and crore is 1,00,00,000 so a lakh crore is 10^12 or a
trillion. Rs 16,076 crore is 160.7 billion and today's rate is Rs 67/$).

2. Your "chit chat" impressions are on-the-mark. Modi is a master of
exaggeration (and that is not my exaggeration). The LPG bonanza is to get
his face on billboards and win women's votes. This wasn't his scheme and
health ministry had little to do with it, but he claims credit. That's
political skullduggery as usual. I still haven't fogured out how the
subsidy amounts are set and whether the Finance Minister is free to choose
as world oil price changes. India has a very opaque system of energy
pricing and quotas (state level, customer level.) Byzantine.

3. India imports LPG and is a small fish in the world market still.
(Haven't looked at forecasts. India also has production rights in oil and
gas elsewhere and LPG from refining foreign crude for re-export probably
leaves quite a bit of LPG behind.) As Mo Adelman famously put it, "Earth's
oil resources are finite because the earth is finite. Nobody knows what the
limits are." Or, "What matters is not how much is left in the ground, but
what the marginal cost is." India's non-subsidized LPG use is probably
inching to a half of the subsidized LPG. Will check the numbers. Oil
companies are humongous money earners for the government.

4. By some calculations, GHG emissions "per meal cooked" - or net MJ
delivered to the pot - are LOWER for LPG than for traditional unprocessed
biomass solids with uncontrolled combustion. Depends on whether cooling
aerosols are netted out (they are not for coal power, for instance), and of
course on fuel chemistry, stove type, operating practices, and methods of
measurement. Also depends on whether one counts NMVOCs and BC, uses 20-yr
GWP (my preference) and falls in the "renewable biomass" trap. (I for one
don't; it doesn't matter if the next ton of photosynthesis in the garden
opposite my apartment sequesters the CO2 from my charcoal stove or my car
or the gas power plant a mile away or CH4 from cattle manure still found in
Indian cities.) I think Bond and Sun published a paper in ESD in 2003 and
before that Kirk Smith and others in ARRE in 2000.

5. I don't hold every gram of CO2 responsible for climate change. Balancing
the earth on the back of the poor is another instance of what Britta Victor
calls "accidental imperialism". (Another post soon. I happen to think CDM,
Voluntary Carbon is the prettied up imperialism as the European churches
were, until they went native. However, I helped with some earliest CO2
offset projects and still see some value in them, just not in the
transaction costs and paperwork to keep finicky beancounters employed and
happy.) The poor suffer the climate whether or not it changes. At least,
make their lives easier subsidizing food and fuel.

I hope you get good press. No need to blame LPG subsidies; stake a claim
for stove and fuel subsidies, first the development and marketing costs.
You might be blocked by MNRE. You ought to get support from GACC; it claims
to be a GOI partner.

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

*Crispin:*

Yes, the very first line is not only inaccurate, it's outright nonsense - "Air
pollution kills more Indians than any other risk factor with estimates
ranging from 15 to 20 lakh premature deaths annually."

Risk factors don't kill, diseases kill.

Attributability is not causality.

But why do diseases happen? Something has to be blamed, no? God or Satan,
you or me. Reason points to "environmental factors", and reason breeds
dogma, as it did with theologians who specialized in angels or deos. These
days IHME folks perform "super-human" tasks as they claim, and "got away
with murder" as they confess.

Why does it matter? Public health folks have been at it for decades now,
negotiating attributability by means of heroic assumptions and bad data.
Kirk Smith has noted the limitations of such adventures.

Maybe premature death should be counted at age 60. Maybe air pollution will
cause disease and eventually death for 1 million people in 2040 but because
of ambient air pollution. Maybe childhood pneumonia is better treated by
vaccine and prevented by better hygiene and nutrition. Maybe LPG stoves
have no health benefit; people want them like they want pizzas or wine. So
what?

The proper but awkward framing is, "Of some 10 million Indians who died
last year before the age 86, the collective blame for their deaths could be
allocated to various risk factors of which air pollution was the largest;
15-20% of such collective mortality can be attributed to it."

All this comes from the assumption of equitoxicity and spurious precision
of the Integrated Exposure Response. Nobody just breathes Household Air
Pollution, nor does anybody have good statistics on household fuel use,
cooking and heating practices, or mobility, concentrations, exposure,
disease incidence, causes of disability or even death.

Academic exercises are for academics; biomass stovers can't even get test
protocols right after 40 years! Indian public stove program went Up in
Smoke.

Bureaucrats won't let private sector succeed where they failed. What do you
think they are - holier than US evangelists?

Some people find God in late life. I have been possessed by Satan; I see
the drudgery of cooking, the plain needless inconvenience apart from the
smoke, as a culprit for severe mental health burden. Even when ALRIs are
reduced from controlling all PM2.5 - ha! - cooks will complain about the
time they have to spend on cooking. The IWA famously took out protocols
that would be "contextual"; it is a coup by thermodynamicists, then murder
by WHO.

The Indian Environment minister has mildly rebuked - rightly, I think - the
HEI/IHME drivel on deaths from air pollution. Front page in the Ahmedabad
edition of Indian Express yesterday.

Attributable is not avoidable. The promises of averting DALYs are
moneymaking propaganda ventures.

N

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/not-sure-about-data-i
n-foreign-reports-on-air-pollution-deaths-environment-minister-4530828
Not sure about data in foreign reports on air pollution deaths:
Environment MinisterGovernment policies could not be framed solely on the
findings of international reports, he maintained.Written by Amitabh Sinha
<http://indianexpress.com/profile/author/amitabh-sinha/> | New Delhi |
Published:February
18, 2017 4:15 am
[image: air pollution, india air pollution, delhi air pollution,
environment minister, Anil Madhav Dave, india news, indian express news,
latest news]Dave said he was happy that air pollution in India was getting
attention but it was “difficult to say whether a million people have died
or half-a-million people have died”

EVEN AS he acknowledged that the health impacts of air pollution were
“real” and “dangerous”, Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave on Friday
contested some of the numbers presented in a new global report, which has
identified India as the worst affected country and attributed more than a
million deaths in the country in 2015 to air pollution. Dave said he was
happy that air pollution in India was getting attention but it was
“difficult to say whether a million people have died or half-a-million
people have died”. He said he would rather believe research conducted by
Indian institutions to establish numbers like these.

“The government is very aware of the problem of air pollution and we are
already taking a number of steps to deal with it. There is no doubt that
air pollution is a big concern, not just in Delhi but also in many other
cities of the country… But I am not sure about these numbers that come out
in these international reports. We have our own institutions working on air
pollution and I would like to trust them more,” Dave told The Indian
Express.
Here's How The Supreme Court Describe Delhi's Air Pollution


The minister said he was not questioning any of the reports, which he
described as “good academic exercises” that have helped in raising
awareness about the problem. However, government policies could not be
framed solely on the findings of international reports, he maintained. “We
have an ongoing plan of action and are continuously thinking about what
kind of approaches will bring the most benefits… In a way, this report is
not telling us anything new. We are aware of the problem and taking
action,” he said.

The first-ever State of Global Air report by the Boston-based Health
Effects Institute, released earlier this week, said air pollution has
become the leading environmental cause of death worldwide, with India and
China accounting for more than 50 per cent of all deaths attributed to air
pollution. It said that India now “rivalled” China for the dubious
distinction of carrying the “highest air pollution health burden” in the
world.

Meanwhile, Dave’s cabinet colleague, Harshvardhan, said it was clear that
much more needed to be done to check air pollution. He said he had been
associated with the World Health Organisation for many years and takes
publications by WHO and other reputed international organisations quite
seriously. “Our government is quite active on reducing air pollution. But a
lot more needs to be done. And we are in the process of taking more steps,
strict steps,” he said on the sidelines of a function.

Message: 10
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2017 23:21:22 -0600
From: Paul Anderson <psanders at ilstu.edu>
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
        <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] LPG India update and comments--- Fwd: [stove and
        climate] Timely op-ed
Message-ID: <d88ba20c-06cf-7958-6ed9-441bda32259c at ilstu.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"; Format="flowed"

Kirk and Crispin,

Kirk might want to reply to your comment about the killing impact of air
pollution.

I note that "ari pollution kills...."   is not specific to   "air pollution
from cookstoves kills..."     Article says the indoor pollution causes
about half of the impact.

To me, seeing this as an "op-ed" comment in a leading newspaper shows that
the pro-LPG people are good at using the media.   I need to learn from
them, and utilize the forces of the media to show realistic
alternatives to billion dollar subsidies.  That will make the news.

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 2/17/2017 10:46 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott wrote:
>
> Dear Paul
>
> Here is the first line of the article:
>
> ?Air pollution kills more Indians than any other risk factor with estimates
ranging from 15 to 20 lakh premature deaths annually.?
>
> So right from the start there is misrepresentation of what is happening.
Air pollution kills = air pollution contributes to premature deaths.
>
> Could you think of a sneakier way to induce the public to think that a life
shortened, a ?premature death? is a death directly caused by air pollution?
>
> Kirk wrote this? Come on Kirk, surely this is beneath you!
>
> Crispin
>
> Dear Stovers,
>
> I received the message below because I am subscribed to the Google
> Groups "stove at lists.berkeley.edu" <mailto:stove at lists.berkeley.edu>
> group.  I thank Kirk Smith for providing this.
>
> A few key points:
> 1.  India on track for 50 million LPG stoves for BOP (base of pyramid) households
by 2019.    (Previously reported cost to be US$1 billion.)
>
> 2. Discussions are on to double the target for early next decade. This
would mean a remarkable enhancement of clean kitchens for hundreds of
millions of people.
>
> That would probably be another billion dollars of government subsidy. That
would be a total of 100 Million LPG stoves for the BOP population, which
the article notes to be about 200 million households burning solid fuels.
 Therefore, with full success the LPG efforts could accomplish half of the
need.   What about the other half?   (My answer is TLUD woodgas stoves (gas
burners that make there gases from dry biomass, analogous to biogas stoves
with gas from wet biomass).)
>
> 3.  From "chit chat" messages from India, I have heard
> A.  of LPG stoves not being used because of distance to get a refill of
the tank (and of course the gas is not free).
>
> B.  people with the subsidized tank-refills selling them for a profit to
restaurants that would pay substantially more to refill their tanks at the
commercial level.   (and possible kick-backs to the people who are hired to
prevent such dealings.)  That is only hearsay from a couple of sources, so
do not quote it as proven.   Illegal actions are difficult to document, for
obvious reasons.).
>
> 4.  I do not know how much LPG India has and can continually produce for
how many years.   Any data would be apprreciated.  Might be abundant, and
might actually help the most accessable half of India's
> BOP households.  But LPG is a limited fossil-fuel resource that does contribute
to atmospheric CO2 increase.   In contrast the TLUD woodgas stoves (gas
burners, not stick burners) use renewable fuels and can
> even become carbon-negative when charcoal is collected and buried as biochar.
 And at a fraction of the billions of dollars that are going to the LPG
industry.
>
> REQUEST:  Can anyone help get this message to any decision makers in India?
 I would like to have a fair hearing about this (about the TLUD woodgas
stoves, not about the LPG aspects, for which the LPG
> lobby already has its support lined up.)
>
> Paul
>
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