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

[Traveller]

Xavier:

I wholehearedly support your call "to ask the GACC to:

   - publicly acknowledge that the WBT has major shortcomings
   - to remove the protocol from its website, so cookstove sector
   stakeholders do not use it
   - to actively promote development and use of other, valid, protocols."

GACC is not accountable to anybody and its Leadership Council has no
legally defined role (which is perhaps why it is not called a Board of
Directors). The only persons who can be publicly shamed are Hillary and
Bill Clinton. (GACC was Hillary's version of Clinton Global Initiative, one
of the lead fronts for Clinton Foundation, since obviously she wanted
something with her signature on it. CGI did promote GACC by and by.)

Nor should GACC continue to enjoy the privileges of being a "custodian" for
WBT, an incoherent, conceptually fatal toy for some technologists just as
DALY baloney has become the tool for infantile epidemiologists gallivanting
from Nepal and Malawi to Nigeria and India. I for one think it should be
forced to leave the TC 285 as the IWA is reviewed and GACC is reformed. In
another post, I will argue that it has failed DfID and the whole "cause" of
individual quantification of multiple benefits - health, climate,
livelihoods, women's empowerment.

Five years since IWA, GACC has little progress to show toward what it
hazily called "international standards". There is no internationally
standard fuel, cook, cuisine, geographic and economic environment. Cooking
is in the chemistries of smells and taste, and physics of touch and optics.

I also question the performance metrics and WHO IAQ Guidelines for
Household Fuel Combustion. But the current base for all cooked up numbers
is either WBT or similar questionable protocols - or worse, measurements
without protocols. (Cite-o-logists wouldn't know that there can't be
measures without methods.) Hence, WBT must go, and a re-assessment of the
failed enterprise must begin.

WBT, RIP.

I won't say the same of GACC, because it did take on far much more than can
be plausibly delivered. The higher ups at UNF should be joined in public
shaming, not GACC staffs.

I suggest GACC gather donor funds to compile an inventory of all methods
and results of "performance metrics" for "baseline" and/or "intervention"
stoves in the last ten years, and also put up an inventory of all emission
and exposure data underlying the updates in Global Burden of Disease since
2008. Lab fanatics do not seem to recognize that small definitional errors
or computational manipulations have huge propaganda consequences.

Nikhil
---------
(India +91) 909 995 2080



On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 2:51 AM, Xavier Brandao <xvr.brandao at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Sorry if I am spamming the Stove List, I will try to post less and gather
> my answers together.
>
> Thanks to those of you who supported the initiative! Each voice counts.
>
> I wanted to say a few words about our stance, especially for non-technical
> people. Some of you have said that the testing issues were very technical
> and complex, and they felt a bit uncomfortable to take a stance on a
> question they don't master completely. This is fully understandable.
>
> I am myself not a technical person, I don't have an engineer or researcher
> background.
>
> In fact, our stance is really simple, it is the following:
>
>    - "Several studies have been published these last years. They conclude
>    that the WBT has a lot of fundamental flaws. That the results generated by
>    WBT testing are not reliable. I am not able to understand everything that
>    led the scientists to this conclusion, but what I can understand very well
>    is the conclusion. These authors are sounding the alarm.
>    - I have not seen, during all these years, anyone answer to these
>    alarms. No scientist contested the outcomes of the study. The burden of
>    proof lies now in the WBT "camp".
>    - So, if there are no satisfactory answer to these critiques, as a
>    concerned stove practitioner (or sympathiser) concerned by the future of
>    this sector, I would like the precautionary principle to be followed. I am
>    asking that the GACC stop promoting this protocol and instead support
>    promotion and development of protocols which validity is not contested."
>
> This is a simple, solid, reasonable position. This is common sense. This
> is something understandable, and no one should go against that.
>
> If you want to support but don't want your name to be public, no problem
> at all, please let me know by email.
>
> I remind you that our goal is to ask the GACC to:
>
>    - publicly acknowledge that the WBT has major shortcomings
>    - to remove the protocol from its website, so cookstove sector
>    stakeholders do not use it
>    - to actively promote development and use of other, valid, protocols
>
> Please support our initiative by writing a simple email to me here:
>
> xvr.brandao at gmail.com
>
> Thank you very much in advance!
>
> Xavier
>
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