[Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT
Xavier Brandao
xvr.brandao at gmail.com
Tue Jan 24 11:01:17 CST 2017
/There is literally no point. Anyone can send their stoves to 5 or 10
testing stations, get 5 or 10 fundamentally different results and then
send in the one that suits the occasion.
/Indeed! Keep playing again and again to improve your score. Send you
best score to funders and call for tenders./
/Expect for-profit companies competing for bids and investment, to do
that! Expect non-profit competing for funding to do the same./
/Huge loophole, that is endangering the whole sector.
On 1/24/17 17:26, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott wrote:
> Dear All
>
> If Camilla can select from a set of WBT results the one that best
> suits the programme qualification(s) sought, and the product is in
> fact the same, what is the point of setting performance criteria?
>
> There is literally no point. Anyone can send their stoves to 5 or 10
> testing stations, get 5 or 10 fundamentally different results and then
> send in the one that suits the occasion.
>
> Two points are supported by these results:
>
> As Philip says, the WBT results are irreproducible, with very
> sophisticated confirmation by Fabio that we should expect no more.
>
> The fundamental conceptualization of the test and what it purports to
> report is somehow defective. It has been analysed technically more
> than conceptually, but I can add that the conceptual problems are
> large and require a ground-up-reanalysis of what we are trying to
> assess and how.
>
> Xavier wrote:
>
> "I am appalled that we are in 2017, and again another study shows how
> much the Water Boiling Test is flawed, and is leading us in the wrong
> direction(s)."
>
> Camilla's point is that you can take it in any direction you want.
> That is from the horse's mouth, so to speak. The meaning is the race
> house actually running says that is now to win.
>
> Regards
> Crispin
>
> PS I have pasted Cecil's relevant comment below this for convenience.
>
> ++++++
> Dear fellow cookstove enthusiasts and frustrati,
>
> As an over the hill back slide applied social anthropologist I whole
> heartedly agree it is time for the stovers of the world to unite and
> give the WBT a belated burial.
>
> Why? Because the WBT is beginning to stink. The accumulating human,
> economic, environmental and societal costs to prolong the life of the
> WBT can not be justified. I vote we pull the plug on the life support
> sophistry and permit the various versions of a fundamentally
> defective stove performance test for efficiency to exit the public
> arena once and for all.
>
> Why? The costs and complexities of prolonging it's existence now far
> outweigh the benefits of WBTesting to identify candidate stoves that
> qualify for inclusion in or exclusion from the category of stoves good
> enough for gov't subsidies, big orders from UNHCR, and investor
> financing, It is time for stovers of the world to unite and stop our
> fiddling while the stoves of Rome continue to burn and emit dangerous
> smoke!
>
> Fortunately we now have alternative ways to assess the performance of
> traditional and innovative candidate stoves that are culturally,
> environmentally, and economically contextualized. Surely it is time
> for the "united stover's of the world" to return to a more eclectic
> and open minded phase of small stove R&D where we allow ourselves the
> space we need to continue experimenting with stoves as combustion
> technologies, as heating devices, and as tools for cooking culturally
> variable foods, and carrying out many different tasks such as small
> scale agri-processing and commercial food preparation.
>
> As an anthropologist I tend to focus on the stove operators role and
> skills, the fuels available and used, the economics of production, etc
> and how these components combine holistically into a dynamic system
> that also includes the fabricators and marketing agents. My preference
> is to step back and to allow traditional and innovative stove
> technologies, elements, behaviors, and cultures to creatively interact
> and evolve toward new optima with the smallest possible interventions
> and costs.
>
> If we "stovers of the world" actually unite, listen to each other and
> get better at learning from our cantankerously different approaches it
> should be possible for us to gradually grow an inclusive eclectic
> approach to stove assessment that will allow us to select those tests
> and observations which document and compare the different
> stove/fuel/culture realities. Some time back Crispin referred to a
> tool kit of different metrics.
>
> So my vote is to retire the WBT as an adequate indicator of a stove's
> efficency. If we had a plebiscite on this list, what are our choices?
> What do we replace the WBT with after it is dead and buried? RIP!
>
> Lastly I believe we are collectively learning about the negative
> consequences of allowing wanna be global authorities to PREMATURELY
> impose universal metrics to rank the performance of stoves that are
> ripped out of their various meaning givi
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