[Stoves] PM emissions from engines

Nikhil Desai ndesai at alum.mit.edu
Wed Jun 7 13:57:15 CDT 2017


Dear Cecil:

Thank you so much for the compliment. I am a "globalizer" too but I am
deeply skeptical of "global public health" methods from whatever I have
seen of it - GBD is one example, use of "Granger causality" in other
contexts is also a nuisance.

But yes, abuse of statistics and statistical categories -- even simply
"households" independent of neighborhood geography and community
institutions -- is intellectual corruption.

The pretense of a lot of theories all around - economics included - is,
"Have datasets, apply methods and tools, hit the computer clicks, and
voila! we have knowledge!"

Over the past generation - with children who had pre-programmed computers
and readymade datasets that they never had to examine one cell or row and
column at a time - this pretense has become so deeply embedded, children do
not even know hat what they are doing is simply pretend and strengthen
groupthink.

You ask, "whose interests are being served and advanced by the abstract
indicator we buy into an use to assess stove performance"

Who else -- bureaucrats (USEPA, DfID, German and Dutch governments), other
donors and middlemen (Gates Foundation, Clinton Foundation), academics, and
consultants including you and me.

What I call the ABCD Complex. Inevitable quartet of the knowledge industry.
We have become our own victims, forget the poor in whose name we claim to
toil. Knowledge? Hah. $1,000 a page, peer-reviewed.

Nikhil

------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(India +91)909 995 2080
*Skype: nikhildesai888*

On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 6:27 PM, <cec1863 at gmail.com> wrote:

> ‎Nikhil you sound more and more like the late Ivan Illich in his last book
> - Rivers North of the Future - where he once again ridicules what he refers
> to as the reduction of humans in communities to iatrogenic abstractions to
> be played with by globalizing professionals whose expertise and power to
> command the big battalions of world civilization depends on such
> inappropriate fragmentation and disempowerment of whole human beings living
> in vital face to face communities all over the planet!
>
> The question to be asked and answered here is whose interests are being
> served and advanced by the abstract indicator we buy into an use to assess
> stove performance and to enable the folks at the BOP‎ to choose the best of
> all paths going forward. I tend to agree with your separation between the
> functional requirements of cooking and space heating stoves.
>
> Cecil the Cook
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
> *From: *Nikhil Desai
> *Sent: *Wednesday, June 7, 2017 2:46 AM
> *To: *Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
> *Reply To: *ndesai at alum.mit.edu
> *Subject: *Re: [Stoves] PM emissions from engines
>
> Crispin:
>
> I take a different view on your comparison of Kyrgyzstan v. Malawi
> studies. From what I can tell of the Kyrgyz study - I haven't yet read full
> report on methodology and results - it is qualitatively different from the
> Malawi study in various respects, the main one being that the former is for
> the same households before and after an intervention whereas the latter had
> a different fuel/stove combination altogether.
>
> Also, I maintain heating and cooking are different functionalities, so to
> call these two studies "functionally the same" is mistaken. That "changing
> the stove improves health in specific ways" is not - repeat, NOT - obvious
> and categorical for all cookstoves.
>
> Besides, the "neighborhood" effect may not be insignificant. In
> Kyrgyzstan, the intervention stoves may have emissions too low to have made
> any effect outdoors, which was probably not the case in Malawi.
>
> In short, I do not give much weight to household emissions and exposure
> testing. Your Kyrgyz project needs to be implemented at scale to show an
> overall "modernization" impact that I expect of it - better comfort,
> insulated homes, better windows, what not.
>
> Too much money is being made off talking about poor people's lungs. People
> are more than oxidation machines.
>
> And cookstoves are also more than oxidation machines.
>
> Nikhil
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Nikhil Desai
> (India +91) 909 995 2080 <+91%2090999%2052080>
> *Skype: nikhildesai888*
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
> crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
>
>> Andrew sez:
>>
>> "Okay, so far part of a good answer: so are you actually saying that
>> indoor air pollution is not a quantifiable cause of bad health, yet we know
>> respiring particulates is?‎"
>>
>> Exactly. We can claim that indoor air pollution has a negative, if
>> unquantified, impact on health. Quantifying that impact is expensive.
>>
>> The Malawi study and the Kyrgyzstan study are functionally the same:
>> observe the health of HH members one by one in homes with and without the
>> stoves claimed to be improved. ‎The Kyrgyzstan investigation also measured
>> the exposure to which individuals were subjected which is about as good as
>> it gets.
>>
>> The results were quite different. In Malawi the background PM overwhelmed
>> any impact / reduction in exposure caused by the stove, at least on a
>> macro-impact level. Child respiratory infections did not change in a
>> statistically significant way. In Kyrgyzstan the needle moved to zero which
>> is very significant.
>>
>> Was the disease in the unimproved stove homes caused by smoke? Low room
>> temperature throughout the day? Cold at night? Gases not considered
>> measurable PM?
>>
>> It is clear the effect was produced by the stove system. In house after
>> house the effect was seen, not just taken together and shown
>> 'statistically'.
>>
>> So we can take that as 'obvious and categorical evidence' that changing
>> the stove improves health in specific ways. To claim that PM causes
>> bronchitis is a stretch, however. PM is not a disease agent any more than a
>> stove is a pill. Removing all PM from a chronically under-heated home
>> ‎might have no effect at all.
>>
>> For all the noise usually made about how women do all the cooking and
>> young children hang around them ‎getting exposed, the Kyrgyzstan project
>> showed that men are more exposed to PM2.5 than everyone else. Put that in
>> your corn-cobbie and smoke it!
>>
>> In the Naryn region, Dr Sooronbaev says 100% of adults over 40 have
>> COPD‎. That is probably caused directly by exposure to stove smoke indoors.
>>
>> Crispin
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>>
>
>
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