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

Traveller miata98 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 27 03:57:39 CST 2017


Ron:

It must hurt to read Crispin's words - "The WBT is dead in the water. It is
sinking of its own accord. Bid farwell. Let's move on. " My sympathies. I
do agree with Crispin.

BTW, I also agree with you that if we only had anthropologists pressing
traditional approaches, we wouldn't have cell phones.

But why do we bother with "better biomass stoves" in these days of cell
phones in the first place? Why don't we design an iStove? (Disclosure: I
have a copyright on the words iCook and iStove, but a dispute with Tim Cook
is pending.)

Compared to you - a staunch defender of the status-quo [WBT, which fails
conceptually, leave alone on reproducibility; I understand Fabio Riva's
paper to mean that expecting reproducibility in the conventional
statistical sense is itself a conceptual error - Cecil comes across as a
radical game-changer.

I submit we need game-changers like Cecil, Crispin, Xavier, Fabio and
whoever else that can knock down this EPA generated technoflab.

I think we do need an anthropologist to study the cult of "renewable
biomass", another cult of DALYs and aDALYs, still another of biochar and
black carbon, all distractions from the task of pleasing the cook so that a
usable cookstove can be designed for specific contexts and needs.

****************

And we need another anthropologists to characterize the cult of WBT.

WBT is a primary stumbling block to any sensible discussion. I hope Cecil
can explain to us why this tribe of water boilers has such command over the
Gabbers Annonymous Clandestine Conspiracy that is GACC. (Sorry, that is
appropriate for a private entity fronting in the public sphere as a
UN-backed, UN-hosted initiative, started by citizen Clinton.)

I have never quite understood why WBT had such a hold on people -- some
legacy of USAID stoves promotion work in the 1970s? Can you or someone like
Stephen Joseph (cc'd here) tell us how many stoves performed in the field
as predicted by WBT? Ten thousand? Ten million? How long?

Or is it simply intellectual inertia, not bothering to think?

Fernando Manibog raised concerns about WBT back in 1983. (I was Fernando's
research assistant; couldn't help laughing even then about the mindless
claims of deforestation threats and of "stove performance" determined by
WBT).

I ignored the technical details and argued against WBT in the wake of the
notorious Lima Agreement (as if those experts had some god-given right to
collude, conspire, and conflate). But I never thought this bandwagon of
"better biomass stoves" would go anywhere any time soon. I knew GERES had
an "Adapted WBT", and others may have had similarly tweaked the WBT, which
made any single WBT protocol rather ludicrous in the first place.

As far as I can tell, Maggis noodles saved more trees than all the
"improved woodstoves" programs combined from 1975 to 2005 (when I stopped
bothering).

Or as much forest biomass burned as in the forest fires in Chile these
days.

Design and implementation of "better biomass stoves" has taken thousands of
person-years of highly skilled, highly motivated persons, some of whom may
not have understood the full purpose of their efforts or set realistic
goals. It is an insult to them all to stick with WBT (or for that matter,
this mania with "international standards").

Who endorsed WBT as the standard or reference in the first place? Whose
interests has WBT served? What interests and when?

I am astounded by the post, "I raised our concerns about the WBT with the
GACC and the Gold Standard in 2015 but no progress for the users of such
tests seems to have happened since then. This is highly worrying as
millions of dollars are paid out based on manipulated test results
“verified and approved” by the GACC as they are the main promoters of this
testing method giving it credibility towards other “non-stove” donors. "

Manipulated? That is a damn serious charge. (I for one think even
performance metrics have been manipulated -- there was no reason to drop

I hope you can answer Xavier's questions before going on and on about how
moving away from WBT - a patent hoax - will tax you and GACC's resources.
(Good ideas will find the money, without threat of Hillary displeasure.)

   - How many tests results are probably meaningless, and so useless? How
   ignorant were we about the real performance of so many stoves? Many of us
   could see how different performance in the field was, compared to
   performance in the lab.
   - How many not-at-all-improved stoves were built, promoted, and
   disseminated?
   - How many stove projects or companies failed because of a test that was
   problematic in the first place?
   - How many efforts, how much money was lost because of poor testing?

(Note: I don't particularly care for answers. We know GACC is
unaccountable. EPA's IG should take notice, as also Congressional
appropriators.)

Nikhil

PS: Did you ever sample cooks about what performance metrics there ought to
be?

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