[Stoves] Noise pollution and premature mortality

[Nikhil Desai]

Crispin:

Short quick answers below. We can take this off-list after this.

Let me first caution you against your own ideological fervor. I don't think
GACC was meant to be for LPG promotion. Back in 2006-7 (roughly) when Shell
Foundation and PCIA started discussions, LPG prices were high and the PM2.5
adventurism - using equitoxicity, Integrated Exposure Response, and the CVD
attributions - hadn't picked up. All this came in during 2011-14, and my
chaiwalla prime minister came in mid-2014 to change the Indian LPG scene.
(Or so he claimed.)

Do not rush to ascribe to conspiracy that which mere naivete and passion
...

1. There are many heart diseases and many risk factors. Attributability
depends on assumptions and IHME negotiations for blame allocation. Kirk
Smith cautioned that attributability is not avoidability, and I take the
view that health is indivisible (though diseases may be separable and
treated). This is what makes IHME DALY computations useless for predictive
purposes. Different cohorts, multiple confounding factors. This doesn't
mean nothing can be done; separating areas of environmental health - air
pollution (including from urban wastes), water pollution, noise pollution -
can give urban authorities and urban designers an overall sense of "human
environment" and adopt, apply tools of urban management in the rich
countries. Another discussion altogether, once we get our heads out of the
stove firebox.

2. Yes, GBD allocation has to be recomputed every time. New and better
data, epidemiological results, and change of cohorts, to count a few
factors. Why, the "Integrated Exposure Response" fantasy didn't come in
until after 2014. I don't know when PM2.5 under the "equitoxicity"
assumption came in. From what I recall, the 1996 version - maybe it was
2000 - of GBD had no mention of HAP PM2.5. Yet another reason IHME
computations have no prediction value (even if they were backed by real
data and plausible assumptions without abuse of econometric tools.)

3. Yes, there are "speculations" about global applicability of spotty
studies of emission rates, emission factors, kitchen concentrations and
indoor exposures over short periods. The temptation to use anecdotes - even
fake ones - to incite political opinion is understandable; Donald Trump
does that all the time. Ideological fervor wrapped in scientific robes is
quack medicine.

Not all is rotten. Please don't think in terms of "health impacts". Health
is not measurable. What is identifiable and measurable is disease, and
there are avenues of treatment as well as prevention to begin with.

It is not permissible to argue that somehow "clean cooking solutions" will
prevent specific diseases in specific populations at specific rates. It is
this "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" that we must be careful against.
The precision is fake. DALYs are not devils to be kept at bay by avoiding
the sin of solid fuel use.


Nikhil

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On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 6:37 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> Thanks Nikhil for the clarification.
>
> Both the ‘noise’ article and the many ‘stoves articles’ advance the claim
> that heart disease is exacerbated (and possibly caused) by stress and
> particulates, respectively.
>
> So they are lumped together in the same ‘heart disease’ bin. I recall
> multiple times when Apartheid was blamed in print as the cause of
> widespread heart disease in the Black South Africa population. Later, it
> was discovered that the main contributor was a bacteria that is quite
> common, easily transmissible, and which targets the heart. It is largely a
> contagious not ‘occupational’ disease.
>
> From your earlier descriptions, the GBD allocation of causes must consider
> this type of new information each time they meet. As that same population
> is exposed to wood smoke, LPG smoke, kerosene smoke, cigarette smoke and
> every sort of industrial PM emission from roads to factories and power
> stations and bread baking, it is going to be hard to tease out which
> portion of heart disease is actually caused by cooking stoves.
>
> >I don't know about noisy versus quiet stoves -- except the Primus
> pressure stove versus Nutan or Umrao wick kerosene stoves in my childhood -
> but all you have to do is measure dB in some lab test, with an "adjusted"
> WBT protocol.
>
> I was not aware that a Primus with a roarer head could be a cause of heart
> disease merely listening to and cooking on it. They are extremely low on CO
> emissions, barely detectable. Wick stoves produce no noise at all, but
> higher PM. Maybe there is a balance in there somewhere.
>
> >>You ask "Is it true that the first assumption about solid fuels, that
> they are ‘dirty’, is being validated by the numbers derived from that
> self-same assumption?"
>
> >It's not even that. To call solid fuels "dirty", there have to be some
> notion of what the emission rates are and what the consequences are, what
> the pathways are.
>
> Even ‘that’ would render the number no more than logical errors. You are
> saying there are mere speculations. I don’t see how we can use speculations
> in a stove performance rating system.
>
> >You see, appearances to the contrary, there is no "bottom up" model of
> emissions to morbidity. Rather, GBD is a "top down" Blame Allocation Tool
> (BAT).
>
> That is becoming clear to everyone I think.
>
> >Quite batty, you might say. There is "no there there".
>
> If it is a logical/causal loop, there is literally no ‘there’.
>
> >More later if you wish on the commonality between noise pollution and air
> pollution DALY cakes.
>
> How stoves are perceived to fit into this mix is important because we are
> supposed to work on ‘the problems of the day in which we live’. One of the
> problems I see is that this health impact stuff is ‘just made up’ then
> given lipstick and a bow. There seems to be no basis for the PM performance
> targets in IWA 2012:11, they were just made up, and the IWA name is the
> bow. If the logic behind the WHO’s current ‘emission rates’ is circular
> starting with ‘solid fuels are dirty’ and looping around to ‘See? They
> can’t burn clean enough because they are dirty’ emission rates, we can’t
> adopt them. If we did, it is nothing more than agreeing that solid fuels
> can’t burn ‘cleanly’, which is demonstrably untrue.
>
> Maybe the whole thing is just a way of promoting LPG.
>
> Regards
> Crispin
>
>
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