[Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT

[Rebecca A. Vermeer]

By golly Neil Taylor -- what a terrific dissertation!!!    Thanks a million!!!

Rebecca Vermeer
Eco-Kalan Project in the Philippines


----- Original Message -----
From: "NEIL TAYLOR" <neiltm at uwclub.net>
To: "DISCUSSION OF BIOMASS COOKING STOVES" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2017 7:28:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT

On 25 Jan 2017 at 9:00, Samer 
Abdelnour wrote:

> What function does the WBT serve (and to whom) such that it is
> afforded such resilience?

That's the really crucial question.  Qui 
bono - who benefits?

 > This is an entirely different question 
> than:
> What function should a stove test serve (and for whom)?
> 
> Let's assume there is wisdom in all arguments for and against the WBT. If
> you wish to 'bury it' first seek to *genuinely* understand what it means
> for various actors (donors, designers, manufacturers, users, sellers, lab,
> etc.). By genuinely I suggest start by asking those who use and champion
> it. Is it simple? Cost effective? A means to game donors? A mechanism of
> control? Does it confirm dogma? Is it just the way things are done? Does
> it legitimate investments in equipment and labs? Understanding these you
> may offer improved alternatives that at minimum address these needs, which
> in turn may encourage people to move on from it.

Another possibility to add to your 'what 
it genuinely means' list to look at should 
be 'hidden agendas' in relation to 
'donors'.  This should be at the top of 
your list to investigate wherever 
governments, global banks and tax 
exempt foundations are involved as 
here.

Parrallels might be in trying to 
understand why a supposed consensus 
on something like Anthropogenic Global 
Warming (AGW) needs to be so strong 
armed politically and propagandised, 
and in fact enjoys significant dissent 
amongst climate scientists themselves 
and always has.  Since global problems 
require global solutions, if your agenda 
is global governance, which is a potent 
agenda pursued at least throughout the 
entire 20th century, only now coming 
out of the shadows and openly 
proclaiming itself where it was last 
year's 'conspiracy theory' to be 
ridiculed, then there is your primary 
'justification' for it.  It might be true of 
course, but truth in such matters 
becomes the primary casualty where 
such interests get to work.

What follows is an example I have 
researched myself somewhat, combined 
with some insider insights as it were 
into the car industry (my brother being 
an automotive systems designer), and 
which keeps striking me as a possible 
very close parallel to the entrenched 
WBT, but that's not my expertise, so I 
don't know.  But I can offer possible 
precedent in a possibly parrallel 
example for others to investigate 
perhaps?  If of no interest please stop 
reading here.

I offer as brief an account as possible 
for others to maybe find their own 
parrallels if they indeed exist of course:

The EC mandated rolling road test for 
cars to determine their fuel 
consumption, and mathematically 
derived from that figure, their emissions 
rating is now 20 years old and has 
always been seriously flawed and 
misrepresentative of real world 
motoring.  The test was revised in 97 
(+/-  a year), and imposed on all 
member states.  Publishing alternative, 
more real world tests in manufacturer 
advertising, even in addition to the 
mandated ones, was criminalised, just 
to make sure that only one version of 
reality was to prevail.  Except that the 
test has always been resented by the 
car buying public for often grossly 
exaggerating the fuel economy, hardly 
anyone ever being able to get the 
government figures. The recent VW 
scandal where they finally got caught 
for programming routines into the ECU 
to recognise when the car was being 
'tested' so that they could cheat the test, 
was but the tip of an iceberg of 
institutionalised corporate and 
government fraud, their context being a 
fraudulent test in the first place, so the 
ethics involved are already criminal. 
Prior to this test, I personally found it 
always easy to do better than the 
government fuel economy figures, but 
by 97 a different game was afoot.  To 
(pretend to) reward motorists for 
buying smaller more fuel efficient cars 
(supposedly) the government reduced, 
even to nothing, the cost of the 'road 
fund licence', a tax on cars in addition to 
the tax on fuel at the pumps.  An article 
in the motoring press exposed this 
scam, but failed to fully understand it, 
calling it a cheat on the taxman as well 
as the motorist.  What the journalist 
failed to grasp, or wasn't allowed or 
encouraged to grasp, who knows, was 
that the extra amount of tax the 
motorist would pay for the larger 
quantity of fuel they would have to buy 
as a resut of not getting the claimed fuel 
economy, (except perhaps for the lowest 
annual mileages), would vastly outweigh 
the tax reductions on the 'licence', so 
the taxman was in fact also profiting 
from this scam, giving away much less 
than they were taking extra.  The car 
manufacturers 'forced' by the state to 
exagerate how economical their cars 
were, also benefited from being legally 
compelled to lie, and of course last but 
not least the oil companies didn't suffer 
too much drop in sales, if any, by 
ensuring that the new cars would use 
almost as much fuel as they had been 
doing.  In fact is was by buying my first 
post 97 car that I discovered  the 
horrendous mismatch between the 
claimed figures and what I was getting 
that impelled me to understand how this 
could be.  My new model was actually 
less economical on fuel than my old car 
it replaced as the manufacturer's next 
model. It also had woefully less power 
while claiming to have significantly 
more, and no dynamometer was 
necessary to determine that!  So I had 
been lied to, big time.   Conned, along 
with everyone else, but cognitive 
dissonance ensures that most will 
accept any other explanation than one 
as uncomfortable as that.  So the 
biggest shock to me was the extent to 
which the car buying public had 
accepted the new reality.  They couldn't 
understand why I imagined I could get 
or do better than the official figures.  
Well, I'd been in my own time warp, that 
was all, but they it seemed could not 
remember a different reality!  That was 
a bit scary, and an example of how 
easily conned we can be.

The state works for corporations and 
banks, it only pretends to work for us.  
Surely there can't be many of us left 
still managing not to notice this fact by 
now?  The only honest sense I believe it 
is possible to make of the above 
dissonance between reality and what it 
is falsely claimed to be, the militant 
determination not to correct an 
insupportably flawed test in 20 years,   
is that it demonstrates that the 
APPEARANCES of reducing fossil fuel 
consumption, of thereby reducing 
supposed global warming by reducing 
carbon emissions, is more important 
than actually doing so.  If you entertain 
this idea for a moment it becomes 
immediately obvious that if AGW is a lie, 
then the liar will have no intrinsic 
motivation to act honestly to correct 
something which they know is a lie, they 
will only be concerned with appearing 
to do so, and sure enough, this explains 
the militant resistance of the false 
construct to be corrected and the 
criminal penalties for challenging it.  
The beneficiaries are the oil companies, 
the car manufacturers and 
governments.  They all win while 
muggins Jo Public is successfully 
conned, and we don't really understand 
how it works and remain sufficiently 
confused and bamboozled, muttering 
impotently under our breath - just 
another of life's myriad little 
disappointments.

Where my little bit of insider insight 
comes in is through my brother having 
worked on optical sensors measuring 
the color of the combustion in the 
cylinders to be fed back to modify the 
fuel injection on the next firing of that 
cylinder. We never got that technology! 
This enhanced 'lean burn' technology 
was abruptly halted when catalytic 
converters were synchronously globally 
mandated as THE engineering solution, 
and no other permitted, to meeting 
emissions targets set by the state.  The 
banned technology would have 
delivered far better emissions as well as 
significant fuel economy gains, and 
better served the AGW mitigation 
agenda.  My brother complained that 
'politicians should never mandate the 
engineering solutions, they can set 
targets, but should then leave it up to 
the engineers to determine how best to 
achieve them. (false 'stupid people in 
power' theory)  This is not the world 
auto engineers nor stove designers live 
in though unfortunately.  I have no 
proof of this, but someone may have 
worked it out I suppose, but given the 
power to compell the worlds motorists 
to adopt the catalytic converter it would 
seem hardly unlikely that platinum 
mines might not have been hoovered up 
prior to such vastly increased demand 
for the metal, and its subsequent 
increase in value.  Its all 'insider 
trading' at the very top.
The 'cat' then needs to waste more fuel 
in order to raise its temperature to 
operate properly, so another aversion of 
threatened reduced demand for oil, 
actually increasing demand in the name 
of protecting the environment!  The joke 
doesn't end there, because then they 
decide that NOx is too high, despite it 
representing an insignificant 
atmospheric source compared to 
agriculture, so they feed exhaust back 
into the inlet to cool the combustion to 
reduce the NOx.  More wasted fuel, and 
gunked up engines  This then increases 
the particulate emissions in diesels 
which brings in expensive even more 
dysfunctional particulate filters to deal 
with that.  Band aid on top of band aid 
on top of band aid, or a tissue of lies 
propping up the original lie, by which 
time they have all but successfully killed 
off the diesel engine, with the petrol 
engine not far behind (hello electric 
cars, walkable communities).  Nobody 
likes the new cars and get busy ripping 
out the filters and blanking off the 
exhaust gas recirculating valves in 
order to get back to the reliability and 
decent running and affordable running 
costs they used to enjoy.  We should be 
enjoying superb reliability performance, 
economy and cleaner air, but we are 
enjoying none of those things to the 
extent we could, if at all, if the industry 
and its regulators were not so corrupt.

Maybe, the reason GACC appears to 
promote oil (LPG) over sustainable 
biomass is because the same corporate, 
banking, foundational vested interests 
are behind GACC no less? They seem to 
be largely funded by governments, so a 
suspect source to the extent 
governments are suspect.  It used to be 
pitifully easy to just look up who the 
sponsors were of such outfits, but the 
trail is usually a little harder to expose 
these days.  I don't know, but the way to 
answer the question is to follow the 
money and ask your question 'who are 
the beneficiaries'.  Not the minor 
beneficiaries in your list either, since by 
definition they don't decide anything, 
they are not the ones forcing the WBT. 
If that is the thinly diguised direction of 
GACC, and it is appearing thin to some 
of you on this list at least, then corrupt 
global governance may be the real 
answer.

Another way it may work is by 
effectively forcing discredit on the 
biomass stove developers by lumbering 
them with a rubbish test (if it is? - I 
wouldn't know).  There seems to be a 
crisis of credibility precipitated at the 
moment, and if the WBT is fatally 
flawed it could be a ticking time bomb 
to be detonated at some strategic point, 
(maybe now?) as GACC then shift all 
blame or responsibility for enforcing it 
onto others.  You would know at that 
point that a job had been done on you, 
but you would also be out of a job at 
that point, and no one listening to you.  
Join the optical sensors developers!

There is no money in gathering and 
burning unprocessed biomass for free 
beyond the development of a stove to 
burn it in.  So no matter how cleanly it 
can be burnt to pass any credible 
emissions standards, a huge potential 
market for oil is substantially 
threatened.  Subsidies for LPG get over 
the problem of the poor being too poor 
to buy it, by simply plundering others 
elsewhere with more resources to pay 
for it instead.  Just as the 'free' 
electricity for 'fuelling' the electric cars 
is paid for by the motorists in their oil 
burners (and basically everyone).

Fuel scarcity is politically, economically 
engineered in the first world at least.  It 
isn't real.  Whole forests, including 
some old growth are being turned into 
pellets using huge amounts of energy to 
dry the wood and make the pellets.  
These are then dieseled across the 
Atlantic in ships (that have to be made 
using oil) so that they can be burned in 
Yorkshire England in a power station to 
make electricity that used to burn the 
coal under the ground it sits on in vast 
amounts to this day, but which it was 
decided will stay there - another 
globalised energy shift which actually 
employed the same hatchet man to end 
UK coal, fresh from doing the same job 
in the US - (McGregor I remember his 
name was).

Its all wall to wall fraud in the name of 
vested interest, power and control, but 
its really not that hard to work it out.

I wish you guys luck working it out 
because it should affect what you do.  If 
a con is exposed then its a fail, a bust, at 
least for those realising it is, as opposed 
to not letting themselves be persuaded 
otherwise, and kept strung along 
because the personal investment in a 
more benign world picture is too great 
to endure the paradigm shift.  It then 
explains how divide and rule gets to 
destroy your community, as base 
motives or flawed integrity is 
missapplied to those labouring honestly 
in the field, by others doing the same, 
and I'm seeing that being flung around 
here a bit, and not applied where such 
accusations really belong.  With eyes 
wide open to a wicked world you will 
then be faced with real options, albeit 
seemingly more limited ones, which 
were always limited no less, regardless 
of your perception of them.  Grass roots 
initiatives keeping away from 
corporate/gvt/foundation funding might 
enjoy limited smaller scale local 
success, but then subverting the funded 
initiatives into doing real beneficial 
work as for eg. Crispin is managing so 
well, may be another, but unless the 
critical awareness to the political and 
economic environment in which you 
work is developed, at best your good 
work will be claimed and successfully 
owned by those very interests whos 
agendas are entirely self serving, 
ultimately working against the very 
people you are striving to help.

Neil Taylor



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