[Stoves] Stove Conf in Poland this month

Wed May 3 20:12:00 CDT 2017

Crispin:

I fully and wholeheartedly endorse your msecond charge - "space heating for the billions .. is not high on the agenda of "clean energy" people".

"Clean energy" is a deliberate betrayal of poor people. 

I think global warming sophists had a leg up on "clean energy", a term interchangeably used with "sustainable energy", popularized by Gus Speth's coterie of staff and consultants on "renewable energy", first at WRI and then at UNDP. 

The poor were duped, not that anybody told them what was cooking in Washington and New York. By the time IPCC accounting trickery - firmly excluding GHG emissions from biomass from national inventories - was adopted by the experts, and then the Second Assessment Report was tabled by the experts, just as the FCCC came into force, "energy for development" was cleanly anesthetized. 

I am serious. "Global Environment" became the dominant narrative, not "Development". Attacks from both the left and the right - I have witnessed and been appreciative - pushed energy systems investment for development at the back burner for a decade or more, with the merriest grin on the faces of oil exporters and diesel generator sellers and rent lords as power shortages ravaged Africa, eating up debt relief of billions of dollars when retail diesel cost got $2+ a gallon, $400+ a gallon. 

The goddess of "clean energy", Mommy Earth, grinned with satisfaction. Enough poor had been sacrificed. 

The lords of the theory class - Nick Stern, R K Pachauri, et al. - liked baking their breads on the fires of poor people's homes. 

There are some in the leisure class - I am reminded of an energy advisor babe placed in an African country by a European government - who delude themselves that they are carrying the earth on their backs and tell the poor (government of the host country) that LPG must continue to be taxed because it is a fossil fuel. 

In order to save the Bangladeshis from sea level rise in 2100, Africans today must die of the drudgery of renewable biomass; premature deaths from smoke extra. (This was when IHME probably didn't exist, and the global premature mortality from solid fuel was probably around 0.5 million. More money was poured in over the years to revise the definitions and assumptions, leading to perhaps an order of magnitude increase in the pipeline. Read Kirk Smith's Millions Dead paper.)

There IS a class war against the energy poor. 

I will absolve WHO and TC 285 of their lies of "clean" if they did away with PM emission rate targets and instead offered an exposure management strategy where "clean cookstoves" as contextually defined in actual use were just one of the tools. 

Remember, WHO's war on solid fuels is based on two stupid errors - a) using Solid Fuel Use as a proxy for pollution exposures and b) applying unverifiable assumptions of fuel types, qualities, quantities, and emission factors. 

In turn, I think that is based on a 2001-2 paper by Kirk Smith and Sumi Mehta, with additional assumptions about Ventilation Factors, exposures, and if I am not mistaken, dose-response curves. 

[Between 2002 and 2006, various biofuel use inventories were compiled by 3-4 US groups and lastly by the IEA. Then by 2010, there were a couple of updates by UNDP or by Practical Action for UNDP, based on DHS and some Census data; I had examined those plus some WLPGA, UN and IEA data for LPG and electricity. More or less the biomass energy data were based on incomplete data subjected to assumptions and misinterpretations. 

Just as biomass energy "resource gap" or deforestation data were cooked up. I may have done some so myself, calculating investment requirements for the forestry sector of developing countries. That was in 1981, two years before I got into looking at the ICS projects. I guess I learnt to think of investments in growing trees for fuel, while others were desperate to save trees by improved wood combustion efficiency. I saw the forest, they saw the tree. Continued for 35 years and counting.)

All of which grew into the GBD and BAMG song and dance. Assumption-philia, but not a war against the energy poor.  (The State of Global Air report a few weeks ago says that IHME and WHO databases are different, but when it comes to household fuel combustion, that is most likely a difference in name with no distinction.)

+++++++++++++*

The war on coal is real but not because of the chattering class who keep on inventing accusations on coal per se, without regard to combustion methods, contexts of exposures, and differences in cohorts. 

To me, this is the Western baby boomers' cultural war. This "improved, knowledge-fortified" generation has fuel fetish - coal is dark, dirty fuel used by inferior races, while solar is clean, white energy. 

Whose energy? Cleaning what (except for taxpayers' pockets)?

Or, if you take WHO, the glib washing the brains of the gullible. 

Next movement - "Clean brains". Or "Rinsed brains." The dogma of "clean" and "sustainable" - at any financial and human cost - has been, and is being, drilled in the educational systems most places in the world. Intellectual imperialism meets fact-proof media and other bridgeheads in thinktanks. Some engineering and business schools avoid this divinity school charade. No, no: divinity schools are more rigorous than colleges like GWU with their course on "Sustainable Table".

At least, GACC is more careful than UNDP, in my books the perpetrators of "clean energy" and "sustainable energy". Intellectual crimes of the top order were they also not undefinably ludicrous. 

GACC distinguishes - and variously chooses - "clean cookstoves" (no such thing), "clean fuels" (I do endorse this term, theoretical hairsplitting notwithstanding), and "clean cooking solutions" (which I prefer, so long as WHO, TC 285 and the expert class generally take a backseat and put in charge the cooks of meals, not the cooks of numbers). 

I suppose GACC does have a thing or two against coal - not a major cooking fuel at this time - and may have a love-in with gas and electricity. Their class bias shows, but they are not alone and no government is going to take their advice if it finds it unaffordable. 

The real "war on coal" is, like "war on nuclear." More ideological, cultural blather and political thunder. Some 33 years ago, Fortune magazine, that mouthpiece of socialist greens, wrote that nuclear power in US died of its own errors and hubris. I think the same is true of the US and European coal mining industries. Many errors at company and industry levels. 

Both coal and nuclear thrived in China since the 1990s. I haven't looked lately but sea-borne steam coal trade has probably held up steady, changing routes and power plants. 

Yes, there is local air pollution and there is acidic deposition. I spent roughly 15 years studying or litigating that. But tremendous gains have been achieved in cleaning up the coal fuel cycle, especially in power generation. (Poland is an exception, and I hope this summit also covers BC and cooling aerosols from Polish power generation. Coal helps cool the planet in the short run, as Jim Hansen recognizes.)

Nikhil 

Nikhil Desai
+91 909 995 2080
Skype: nikhildesai888

> On May 3, 2017, at 12:54 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Paul and All
> 
>> This link will give you the program, and one (of several) title that
> says:   The Heating+Cooking and Coal Heatstoves Summit.    So there is 
> at least a significant part of the agenda about COAL.   What will be said?
> 
> http://ccacoalition.org/en/events/stoves-summit-addressing-black-carbon-and-other-emissions-stoves-globally?utm_source=May%202017%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=May%2017%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email
> 
> It is mostly about black carbon and is in part sponsored by the ICCI.
> 
>> Agenda mentions
>> Tami Bond (keynote speaker) [Black Carbon]
>> GACC [something about stoves that cook as well as heat]
>> Mongolia [CPP Development of coal stoves with extremely low PM and BC emissions]
> 
> The theme advertised was wood stoves that heat and cook, and coal stoves that heat. I think the main sponsor is the government of Poland. The focus, as I understand it, is Eastern Europe. There is another initiative under way to develop better stoves and housing for the Roma people which is in theory covered by this larger agenda. Both initiatives validate the concerns of poor people that their energy needs are not being very well appreciated. 
> 
>> TWO points:
>> 1.  Why has this not been mentioned before on the Stoves Listserv??
> 
> Maybe because it is mostly focussed on space heating and BC emissions reduction. 
> 
>> 2.  I hope that someone who attends can give us pointers to key
> presentations, etc.   
> 
> Will do.
> 
>> Specifically, I would like to know if the WOODGAS (TLUDs etc) stoves even get mentioned, and if so, in what way or context.
> 
> It could be mentioned in the context of space heating using a pellet gasifier, I suppose. It is not focussed on particular technologies but the BC emissions from burning solid fuels. Some part of it at least will be devoted to examining the theory behind the dramatic PM reductions achieved in Central Asia which I think we have heard enough about for the moment. 
> 
> There are two things which keep such solid fuel discussion off the agenda, or quiet. One is the continuing war on coal, which is to say that all coal burning is held to be antithetical to clean air regardless of the actual emission. The second is that space heating for the billions who use solid fuels is not high on the agenda of 'clean energy' people. With recent advances in clean combustion of both wood and coal, the equation is changing and we can expect more and more countries to take part in discussions about how to manage domestic energy and issues of poverty and access.  As you are probably aware, the heating energy of the poor is often handled with, "We should given them electricity and gas."  
> 
> Taking Bishkek as an example, there is no spare electricity available, and the gas is supplied by Gazprom which charges a fortune for it. Heating from the power plant (district heating) costs about $8 per month to heat a home. Electricity is not much more. Gas is about $500. As it is difficult to get connected to the district heating system and no more connections are allowed for electric heating, the options are coal or gas. Coal is far cheaper, but the low pressure boilers and stoves available are inefficient (mostly) and have poor combustion efficiency. That is why the winter heating pilot was conducted this season - to demonstrate new technologies, or at least how to think about creating new technologies that may emerge from the local producers.
> 
> Eastern Europe has a large number of people who are dependent on simple home heating systems that could be much more efficient, convenient and cleaner. Poland recognises that.
> 
> Regards
> Crispin
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Stovers,
> 
> This link will give you the program, and one (of several) title that 
> says:   The Heating+Cooking and Coal Heatstoves Summit.    So there is 
> at least a significant part of the agenda about COAL.   What will be said?
> 
> http://ccacoalition.org/en/events/stoves-summit-addressing-black-carbon-and-other-emissions-stoves-globally?utm_source=May%202017%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=May%2017%20Newsletter&utm_medium=email
> 
> Agenda mentions
> Tami Bond (keynote speaker)
> GACC
> Mongolia (?? Crispin's co-workers ??)
> and much more.
> 
> TWO points:
> 1.  Why has this not been mentioned before on the Stoves Listserv??
> 2.  I hope that someone who attends can give us pointers to key 
> presentations, etc.   Specifically, I would like to know if the WOODGAS 
> (TLUDs etc) stoves even get mentioned, and if so, in what way or context.
> 
> Paul
> 
> -- 
> Doc  /  Dr TLUD  /  Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
> Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu
> Skype:   paultlud    Phone: +1-309-452-7072
> Website:  www.drtlud.com
> 
> 
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