[Stoves] Domestic stoves, air pollution and health ==> Back to basics
Roger Samson
rogerenroute at yahoo.ca
Sat Jan 7 14:19:44 CST 2017
Thanks Harold for your fine and detailed overview.
It's pretty obvious that household cooking is quite complicated to come up with any definitive statements over health issues. Look at this USAID funded rural biomass stove study done in the Philippines involving WINROCK. There was no serious risk from biomass cooking over an open flame. REAP-Canada was working in the central Philippine region of the Visayas at the same and we observed the same thing. .. the rural people mitigated the cooking risk themselves.
The rural kitchens just needed ventilation and to be separated from the main house. This is what we are promoting in rural villages in West Africa with our low fuel consuming REAP clay brick stoves. Biomass cooking has high sustainability in well ventilated kitchens separated from the main house and with a simple locally built improved biomass cookstove. THERE IS NO APPRECIABLE HEALTH RISK. The particles rapidly and harmlessly disperse in rural areas. If you read the study it cites another study that denotes open kitchens are as important as fuel switching for reducing exposure. I do not know why GACC is so obsessed with switching to fossil fuels. I do not know why agencies like ours that work on sustainable rural cooking systems with biomass have no sustainable funding pathway with GACC.
I think somebody needs to get the message through to GACC that either they back off on their condemnation of renewable cooking with biomass or we pull out of GACC. All the partners involved in sustainable biomass cooking can form a sustainable household cooking systems alliance and withdraw as GACC partners. I am nearly certain the Chinese government will not favor a vision of a fossil fuel dependent future of LPG for its household cooking systems.
Indoor Air Pollution in Coastal Houses of Southern Philippines
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sumeet_Saksena/publication/247731922_Indoor_Air_Pollution_in_Coastal_Houses_of_Southern_Philippines/links/55c3dab308aea2d9bdc1c833.pdf
"The results of this study suggest that IAP from cooking does not represent a serious health risk to women, despite
the fact that nearly 75% of women surveyed cook with biomass over open fires".
regards
Roger Samson
www.reap-canada.com
--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 1/6/17, Harold Annegarn <hannegarn at gmail.com> wrote:
Subject: [Stoves] Domestic stoves, air pollution and health ==> Back to basics
To: "Discussion of biomass cooking stoves" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Cc: miata98 at gmail.com, "Crispin Pemberton-Pigott" <crispinpigott at outlook.com>
Received: Friday, January 6, 2017, 5:17 AM
Dear Stovers
A) I have been following the debates on stove
emissions, health effects (dallying with DALYs) and carbon
climate neutrality with interest, and varying degrees of
amusement and despair at the grave (or jocular)
misrepresentations of science and the scientific method. My
interventions, under a new thread, are intended to go back
to basics of science on air pollution and health. I hope
thereby to clean up some of the messier aspects of recent
debates that are based on misconceptions of science.
(Regrettably, I claim no authority to be able to similarly
clarify issues of policy, developmental economics or
institutional politics.)
B) As a starting point, a draw your attention to
the following article:
Lung
Cancer, Cardiopulmonary Mortality, and Long-term Exposure to
Fine Particulate Air PollutionC. Arden Pope, III,
PhD, Richard T. Burnett,
PhD, Michael J. Thun, MD, Eugenia E. Calle,
PhD, Daniel Krewski, PhD, Kazuhiko Ito, PhD,
and George D. Thurston, ScD
JAMA. 2002 Mar
6; 287(9): 1132-1141.PMCID: PMC4037163 (Journal of American
Medical Association)The
publisher's full final edited version of this article is
available at JAMA with no
paywall: JAMA. 2002 Mar 6; 287(9):
1132–1141.
Abstract
Context
Associations have been found
between day-to-day particulate air pollution and increased
risk of various adverse health outcomes, including
cardiopulmonary mortality. However, studies of health
effects of long-term particulate air pollution have been
less conclusive.ObjectiveTo assess the relationship between long-term exposure
to fine particulate air pollution and all-cause, lung
cancer, and cardiopulmonary mortality.Design, Setting, and
ParticipantsVital status and cause of death data were collected by
the American Cancer Society as part of the Cancer Prevention
II study, an ongoing prospective mortality study, which
enrolled approximately 1.2 million adults in 1982.
Participants completed a questionnaire detailing individual
risk factor data (age, sex, race, weight, height, smoking
history, education, marital status, diet, alcohol
consumption, and occupational exposures). The risk factor
data for approximately 500,000 adults were linked with air
pollution data for metropolitan areas throughout the United
States and combined with vital status and cause of death
data through December 31, 1998.Main Outcome MeasureAll-cause, lung cancer, and
cardiopulmonary mortality.ResultsFine particulate and sulfur
oxide–related pollution were associated with all-cause,
lung cancer, and cardiopulmonary mortality. Each
10-μg/m3 elevation
in fine particulate air pollution was associated with
approximately a 4%, 6%, and 8% increased risk of all-cause,
cardiopulmonary, and lung cancer mortality, respectively.
Measures of coarse particle fraction and total suspended
particles were not consistently associated with
mortality.ConclusionLong-term exposure to
combustion-related fine particulate air pollution is an
important environmental risk factor for cardiopulmonary and
lung cancer
mortality.|____________
C) The significance of this article for the stove
list debates is that:
It is a primary research article - not a secondary
summarised/re-interpreted version valorised by the WHO.
It deals with statistical associations
(Risk Ratios) between PM2.5 and lung cancer and
cardiovascular mortality over a 16 year period for a study
cohort numbering in the millions. It does not claim or
explain causality.It presents statistical
correlations of Risk Ratios of lung cancer and
cardiovascular mortality. It does use the concepts of
premature deaths, a source of heated contestation in
StoveList debates. It does not enter into a discussion of
the financial value of life or DALYs.The study
deals comprehensively with the confounding effects of
smoking - which has a higher Risk Ratio - and mentions in
passing other factors controlled for and which have elevated
Risk Ratios for the study population (e.g. gross obesity
(level 3).No enhanced Risk Ratio was found in
association with PM10 (defined in the post-2000 sense of
particles below 10 but above 2.5-micron
diameter). D) Arising from this, several
points of clarity regarding the
science:Establishment of Risk
Ratios is a property of the population ensemble
numbering in hundreds of thousands. This ensemble
property of a population cannot be attributed to
individuals or small populations of a few hundred or
thousand. Accordingly, taunts such as "Show me one life
that has been saved by a clean cook stove", reveal a
perhaps jocular but nevertheless foolish conceptual
misunderstanding.PM2.5 and EQUITOXICITY
(addressed mainly to Crispin).
PM2.5 is measured as an INDICATOR of fine particulate
matter (mainly in urban atmospheres). Scientists and
regulators are well aware that fine particulate matter
originates from diverse sources and contains particles of
widely differing physical and chemical composition, and that
some of these species may be more damaging to the human
respiratory system than others. Nevertheless, as an
INDICATOR of urban air quality, PM2.5 serves the purpose of
an indicator. (a) It is readily measurable with a moderate
amount of technical skill and commercially available
apparatus; (b) It is applicable across a range of conditions
in space and time, allowing for tracking of trends. (c) The
indicator values are easily communicated to and understood
by the lay public. PM2.5 is again an ensemble
property, and at a superficial level may one assert that
all particles comprising the ensemble are EQUITOXIC. That
some individuals may have used the term EQUITOXICITY in this
sense, is not intended to be taken literally. To rail
against the term is to set up a straw man argument, dressed
in funny clothes designed to scare off the
crows. However, when it comes to controlling or
reducing sources or PM2.5 in particular localities, then
source apportionment studies are needed, to establish the
relative contributions from diverse sources, that may
include residential wood burning (also in American cities in
colder climates), sulphates from coal combustion, diesel
soot emissions. Reductions are planned and regulated on the
basis of cost-effectiveness, reflected in State
Implementation Plans (SIPs) in USA jurisdictions. Source
apportionment plans deal with reducing the concentrations of
overall PM2.5, without going into issues of health effects
and consequent economic loss due to mortality of morbidity -
the domain of epidemiologists, not air quality regulators.
In the case of specific high toxicity compounds, such as
asbestos fibres or CrVI (chromium valence 6), other air
toxic regulations come into play quite separately from the
generalised PM2.5 control strategies.
On the health effects of various species of particles in the
PM2.5 ensemble (often now referred to as nanoparticles),
there are significant advances in the last decade of
understanding the modes of interaction between particles and
the human physiological system. One interesting finding is
that some materials are more active (toxic) in the finely
divided nano range than one would suppose from the bulk
properties of the material.Inhalation of and
deposition of PM2.5.
Point 2 above leads to the need to clarify misconceptions
reflected in recent stove list discussions concerning the
deposition of particles in the human respiratory system.
Broadly, coarse particles greater than 2.5 microns diameter
are trapped in the upper airways (nose, throat), while fine
particles (<2.5 microns) proceed into the bronchial
system. Particles in the range 300 nm (0.3 microns) and
less, the bulk of PM2.5 mass, behave similarly to gas
molecules and are carried in the air stream through 18
bifurcations of the bronchial system to the alveolar sacs.
Once in the alveolar region, governed by laws of diffusion,
some of the nanoparticles may reach the walls of the
alveolar sacs and be dissolved or absorbed and transmitted
to the blood stream (e.g. nicotine droplets from tobacco
smoke). Insoluble particles are attached by macrophages
(white blood cells) and either transmitted away by the lymph
drainage fluids, or remain in place eventually forming
inflexible fibrous tissue (in advanced cases causing e.g.
silicosis and emphysema). Paradoxically, the very properties
that allowed the nanoparticles to reach the deepest airways,
similarly allow the particles to make their way out of the
lungs and to be exhaled. In each breath, typically only
about 60% of particles are deposited, and 40% are exhaled.
For example, a smoker will still exhale detectable levels of
nicotine fumes for ten to twelve breaths after the last
puff.
Coarse particles deposited in the upper airways can also
trigger physiological responses - one need only mention the
allergic response to inhalation of pollen grains (typically
in size range 5 to 50 microns) that are trapped in the nose.
E. Arising from this, a personal
comment based on my four decades as an academic research on
atmospheric particles. This point addresses ongoing
messiness and confusion in the recent StoveList debates
(which is a good open forum for robust verbal sparring) but
more seriously has resulted in major conceptual confusion in
the debates of the international efforts to devise clean
stove evaluation procedures and associated performance
criteria (tiers).
The fundamental error is to try and combine
efforts to reduce particulate emissions from stoves (source
characterisation and emission control measures) with
Relative Risk outcomes or, even more remotely, with
premature deaths or DALYs.Stove experts
know about stoves, thermal and emissions performance
testing.
Exposure modelling and monitoring of stove
emissions concentrations in homes and air pollution in
general in the ambient environment are separate disciplines
that do not necessarily fall within the knowledge domain of
stove experts.
Correlations between exposure to air pollutants and
specific health outcomes are established by epidemiologists
at a population scale. Even relationships between tobacco
smoke and adverse health outcomes took decades and
population-scale studies to establish. Testing for
causal relationships (i.e. beyond statistical correlations)
between specific pollutants and human immunological
responses is properly the domain of specialised medical
studies.As professional scientists,
environmentalists, developmental economists we are aware of
the broad issues of air quality and public health. However,
when the task was a relatively straightforward assignment:
Develop a standard method for testing the energy and
emissions performance of a domestic stove designed for
cooking and space heating, it is in my opinion a grave
perversion of sound science, technology and regulation to
try and conflate two or more of the above four stages into a
single standard. For well-intentioned students who
approached me to supervise a project on air pollution and
health because they were concerned about the health
consequences of high smoke concentrations (in South Africa
from domestic coal combustion), I had to advise them: I can
supervise a study of ambient concentrations, of the
emissions of stoves, or the characterization of individual
particles or bulk particulate matter. However, as a
physicist, environmentalist, geographer, I cannot supervise
and I cannot marshall the resources to do a health based
study. If you wish to study health effects, then you need to
be in a medical faculty.
I rest my case.
A similar argument can be mounted concerning the
conflation of stove testing and global soil properties, food
security, de/reforestation and global change, but that may
be a topic for a future post.
Best regardsHarold the
Sceptic
(N.B. I am a sceptic by vocation and profession,
for such is the nature of science. To those who wish to
believe, go the church on Sunday or mosque on Fridays. On
all other days of the week, I will tempt you to doubt, ye
even deny, and ask for the evidence.)
Harold Annegarn
Energy Institute
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Mobile +27 (0)83 628 4210 Office
+27 hannegarn at gmail.comhannegarn@outlook.com
On 6 January 2017 at
08:11, Traveller <miata98 at gmail.com>
wrote:
Dear
Ron:
Happy New Year!
First, I am DELIGHTED, RELIEVED to read your definition of a
"climate denier" - "a person with no interest
in carbon dioxide removal (CDR)."
I do have megahours of interest in CDR. Just tell me from
where, when, how much, by whom, at what cost, and where to
put it.
I have been doing CDR for all my life.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Now that I am not a climate
denier, I don't have to fear going to hellfires or ovens
till I die.
It's all a matter of accounting.
***On the other hand, I am sad to see
you start out a New Year on a sour note.
On Haiti and LPG Webinar, I did address your
Comment 1 - "I don’t think many will mind if I
reopen the topic." and Comment 2 - " I
don’t have the time now to prove this, but am sure we can
find climate denial funding coming from this Association.
" I took my cue to reopen the topic from you, and
I also made some comment on WLPGA. Please don't blame me
for your neglect to read.
***
We can continue that LPG thread if you read my replies to
Paul and to you on GACC and Haiti (more to come). Here I
address your "I will respond about Kirk when I am told
which of hundreds of Kirk Smith writings I should read.
"
Oh, dear. I don't know what if anything you have read
from Kirk Smith. You could start with his opinion pieces
- "In Praise of Petroleum", "Power to the
People", and "The Petroleum Product That Can Save
Millions Of Lives Each Year".
I assume you have read his research on putting carbon gases
in the atmosphere via traditional biomass combustion
(defined as uncontrolled combustion of unprocessed solid
biomass).
What you may find is relevant to both this thread as well as
Paul's question on LPG in the Haiti thread about lower
GHGs (and one earlier).
Please also tell us just what of Kirk Smith's papers you
have read on health effects of biomass combustion and quotes
that you like. Taking his name in vain is intellectual
abuse.
In a 6 November 2016 post on this list's thread
"LPG versus gasifiers with dry biomass", I had
cited Prof. Smith's assertion:
"And, as yet, no biomass stove in
the world comes close to the boundary – is clean enough to be truly health protective in
household use."
He was also reported in a Washington
Post item in 2015 “As yet, no biomass stove in the
world is clean enough to be truly health protective in
household use”.
I expressed my dissent from this view, but if you agree with
it, please say so.
Because that means biomass stoving for the last 50-odd years
has failed in terms of being "truly health protective
in household use."
Amen. I was hoping to leave all that in the last
year.
****
Now to the main issue here - biomass power and
climate-neutrality.
It is a matter of ideological accounting, not science.
Whoever has a hammer in hand sees nails everywhere.
Biochar seems to be your hammer.
I have written earlier that I discovered Biochar in 2007/8
and Stephen Joseph made me a believer.
Now just tell me your global plan for biochar. I will be a
partner in Alliance for Biochar Cooking (ABC). GACC CEO can
be invited to help.
I did some CDR work 20+ years ago on TVA
co-firing of peanut shells in Georgia and other biomass
power options. I also worked on CCS (Carbon Capture and
Sequestration) options and putting CO2 in old mines and
domes. How much CDR did you do?
*****
Apart from biochar or such projects, taking the earth system
as a whole, I repeat my assertions:
“To begin with, biomass is not GHG-neutral.
Period. "
This time I will give you some suggestions to read - Ruddiman and
Unger.
Also this.
Prove me wrong.
Water and biomass is nearly there is to understand about
human climate. But please read Kirk Smith, then we can
debate the GHG-neutrality of biomass combustion (alone).
“And if you don't assume that, you leave the
field open to any carbon from biomass combusted anywhere
being re-absorbed in a new tree anywhere."
This is a
scientific truism - that any carbon emitted anywhere may be
re-absorbed anywhere (tree or not) - and other assumptions
are matter of accounting. Prove me wrong.
Chemistry is everything. Not counting molecules. CO2 is not
a WMD; do ask CIA though.
Nikhil
---------
On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at
11:43 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongretlarson at comcast.net>
wrote:
Nikhil: cc List and
Paul
Whew - 5 messages
today from Nikhil and finally one that I can see all of on
my screen at once. (Here’s hoping I don’t have to
read 5 more tomorrow for the third day in a
row.)
In three of the four
others I see one citation - GACC on Haiti. It would help
me (and I think others) if Nikhil would keep all of my
messages, not selectively pull out of them. (for his
GACC2, Nikhil has excised all of my remarks #1 and #3.
Why?)
I will respond about
Kirk when I am told which of hundreds of Kirk Smith writings
I should read. I seriously doubt that Kirk has written
much about the two cites below covering BECCS and albedo.
Note that neither of these have much, if anything, to do
with stoves.
I don’t have time
tonight to refute any of the mostly incorrect and
non-pertinent arguments below, but let me repeat one
(yNikhil, from below)that could only come from a climate
denier - defined here as a person with no interest in
carbon dioxide removal (CDR):
“And if you
don't assume that, you leave the field open to any
carbon from biomass combusted anywhere being re-absorbed in
a new tree
anywhere."
I interpret Nikhil to
mean that CDR via biochar only makes sense when source and
sink are in the same block, county, state, or country, (or
continent?) Whew! If not, what then does he mean? (Of
course you have to read more below.)
In sum, I strongly
support Paul’s gentle request to Nikhil to stick to topics
that relate to this list - not things again/always in
support of coal. And not blame me for not having responded
quickly enough to some un-named publication of Prof. Smith
(whose work, I repeat, on health matters related to stoves
I strongly support - and look forward to learning what I am
supposed to dissociate myself from in order to agree that
the (9:04 AM CDT) climate-denying material (not in any way
stove or health-oriented) below is on-topic.)
Last point for Nikhil
re his last line below
(“To begin
with, biomass is not GHG-neutral. Period.
")- does he think that biochar from
stoves cannot be carbon negative?
Ron
ps. I argue these topics (albedo, BECCS,
afforestation , etc) most every day - on half a dozen lists
- but never on this list.
On Jan 3, 2017, at 12:36
PM, Traveller <miata98 at gmail.com>
wrote:
Paul:
It might become on-topic once Ron reads Kirk Smith.
Nikhil
--------- (US +1)
202-568-5831
On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at
1:05 PM, Paul Anderson <psanders at ilstu.edu>
wrote:
To Nikhil only,
I agree that your message is "Off-topic".
Thank you for making
that clear in your subject line. Please do not make
more messages
that are so far off-topic that they just are beyond the
scope of the
Stoves Listserv.
Thanks,
Paul
Doc
/ Dr TLUD / Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Email: psanders at ilstu.edu
Skype: paultlud Phone: +1-309-452-7072
Website: www.drtlud.com
On
1/3/2017 9:04 AM, Traveller wrote:
Oh, dear. Just because a tree is
releasing CO2
absorbed earlier makes it carbon neutral?
Then all trees could be harvested, burnt, and that
would still
be carbon neutral. I don't think IPCC allows
that -- its
inventorying methods require that such "land
use change" be
reported separately.
****
Another way of putting the question (and I
think this is
implied by the current methods) is whether the
CO2 released
will in future be absorbed by another tree.
But that raises a different problem -- this
re-absorption may
take years and that it may happen somewhere else.
Assuming
that the Drax carbon emissions from biomass
burning were to be
re-absorbed in the US forests where the pellets
came from is
quite a stretch.
And if you don't assume that, you leave the
field open to any
carbon from biomass combusted anywhere being
re-absorbed in a
new tree anywhere.
Since CO2 from wood combustion in a power plant is
no
different from CO2 from my breaths or cremation or
CO2 from a
power plant, it is plausible to argue that CO2
from Chinese
coal-fired power plant is what gets absorbed in
the net
expansion of boreal forests in Canada and
Europe.
Aha! But then we have the dilemma of changing the
albedo effect.
(Reforestation
Doesn’t Fight Climate Change
Unless It’s Done Right, Natasha Geiling,
ThinkProgress, 31
August 2016).
Perhaps it's better to trim boreal forests,
convert into
charcoal, and export to Nigeria, Ethiopia, DRC.
Albedo effect, apart, bioenergy capture has
another problem -
"“But if you are going
to do
BECCS, you are going to have to grow an awful
lot of trees
and the impact on land use may have very
significant effects
on food security,” (Reflecting
sunlight into space has
terrifying consequences, say scientists,
Damien
Carrington, Guardian (UK) 26 November
2014)
In short, the CO2 accounting business is riddled
with
confusion.
****
Deliberate confusion for political purposes. The
methods of
GHG accounting are NOT value-free; they (including
the choice
to use 100-year GWPs instead of 20- or 50-year
GWPs) are
intentionally biased. (I was marginally involved
with this
30-odd years ago.)
The most serious objection to the purported
"carbon
neutrality" of "biomass" is that
depending on combustion
technology, the emissions of non-CO2 GHGs -
methane, which is
counted under Kyoto cooking of numbers, and
NMVOCs, CO, which
Kyoto does not permit -- are more potent than
CO2.
If you add in black carbon, the non-CO2
damage is
significantly higher.
More so if you use 20-year GWP (my preference for
the
developing countries).
The combined GHG loads from biomass direct thermal
use around
the world - when counting all GHGs and black
carbon (I can
cook up some estimates) - are in the range of all
CO2 from
Indian coal-fired power plants, maybe even all CO2
from
Chinese coal-fired power plants.
So, global warming is due to inefficient biomass
use, as much
as it is from India-China coal-fired power
plants.
Surprised?
Some sages said 16+ years ago, "If one is
going to put carbon
in the atmosphere anyway, CO2 is the least harmful
species
from climate or health point of view."
The policy implications of this observation are
profound.
To begin with, biomass is not GHG-neutral.
Period.
Nikhil
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