[Stoves] Malawi Philips stove intervention study and Nikhil's 28 sins of insolence about GACC/WHO (Re: Ron Larson)

Wed Jan 18 16:25:38 CST 2017

Dear Ron

You are in no position to ‘give’ or remove Nikhil chances to do anything. It is clear from your approach to matters in which you take a passing interest that you respect ‘authority’ far more than you should. Appeals to authority are not a valid form of ‘proof’. This was well known to the ancient Greek philosophers. Give it up.

You confuse attacks on policy and actions with attacks on persons. That may be the reason you attack people personally when disagreeing with their policies.  Perhaps you can offer another explanation.

The GACC policies as implemented and as announced are legitimate topics for comment, particular where there is serious harm being done. Blind support for the WBT and it defective metrics is continuing to cause hardship across the spectrum, most recently and most visibly in the call by the UN for stoves to be supplied in lots of 10,000 at a time with the ‘performance’ qualification being a WBT conducted according to the GACC’s latest version of it, using a 7 litre pot.

There may be something ‘contextual’ about such a test and it may be that in a refugee camp there are 7 litre pots and people may boil 5 litres of water in it twice and simmer for 45 minutes. Such coincidence in the duty cannot be expected, however.

But when it comes to rating the fuel consumption, the WBT metric itself is defective because it deducts the char energy remaining from the cooking session from the energy in the denominator of the fuel consumption energy. This is a serious error. It gives the wrong answer. Ron, you have been holding out for this error to be perpetuated ad infinitum. Give it up.

No scientist, no authority, no engineer, can support such a defective intent. Literally, the intention is to continue using a WBT metric that claims a stove uses less fuel than it uses. There is no other interpretation. Calling ‘remaining char’ ‘stove fuel’ is to misrepresent performance. While there are nuances one can provide, the prime motive, to preserve the metric that has cause the loss of millions in stove project funding and the disappointment of millions of ‘beneficiaries’, is amoral. Give it up.

The GACC technical leader is fully aware of the problem, are is the technical staff at the Gold Standard, the EPA, as is Berkeley Air and all the others. They have, as a group, chosen to stonewall the correction to this junk science WB Test, to the direct harm of the stove sector. Numerous individual experts with PhDs in engineering have refused to speak up in favour of correcting this deviant interpretation of performance.

It is a moral failure to deliberately cause harm to millions of people. Doing it as a group does not absolve anyone of their individual culpability. There is even a law in South Africa holding legally responsible groups of bystanders who watch one person murder another. A law in France holds those who refuse to assist someone in trouble to account for their inaction.

If there is anyone left on this list who doesn’t appreciate how much damage is being done, even now, to the improve stove sector, by the Water Boiling Test v4.2.3, let them contact me and I will send them a few things to read.

A similar level of incompetence or malfeasance is being perpetrated by the claims ‘stove smoke causes pneumonia’ and all that jazz.  Nikhil has laid out clearly the defective leaps of logic underlying this claim, and how the abuse of the scientific articles which, ladled with caveats, have been misused to advance impossible and unsupportable claims. Just because ‘something’ has ‘been attributed’ to some cause, does not mean that removing the attributed cause will have any impact on the ‘something’. What is being claimed in the ‘stove-solid-fuel-smoke-health-fan-stove-clean-fuel’ vortex is just the same as saying ‘correlation is causation’. Give it up.

Regards
Crispin

List, Andrew, Tom:

            I am basically sad that Nikhil, after a few amazingly favorable recent messages about his principal past targets (GACC and Radha Muthiah), chose to continue with his past themes:  “… I might as well shower as many invectives as I can…”  ;  “….it seems Ron himself didn’t read it…”,  “ Ron appears to admire “highly qualified” junk…”;   “My friend, I am afraid you don’t know zilch about DALYs. “;  “I have no qualms insulting 15 British professionals,..”;  “UNF is a racket…”;  “…theTC 285 exercise has been reduced to a pretense of morality ..”;  “Otherwise this "better biomass stoves" enterprise is doomed. (I think coal will survive.)”

            So, to avoid giving Nikhil a chance to continue, after he has stated that he was through with this list, I respond only with the few quotes above.  I feel these further exemplify why I took the time to give 28 similar examples from just one message back in early December.  I confess I still don’t understand the reason for such invective - especially given his brief recent turn-around for both GACC and Ms. Muthiah (that is not continued in most of today’s response).

            Glad to communicate briefly with anyone off-list on any of the points he has made below, should anyone want to know how I would have responded, save for my wanting this sad interlude to be over.  But, I will only answer one or two at a time - nothing like the 28 of this message.  And, I may choose to answer some on this list;  I do not want to spend my time in an endless off-list dialog when my responses might be pertinent to list advancement.

Ron

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