[Stoves] SPAM Re: [Stoves Digest, Vol 81, Issue 21] Another attack on solid fuels by public health adventurers

Fri May 26 15:56:00 CDT 2017

Hi Karin

Many of us on this list come from a  renewable energy and development background and find large scale subsidization of fossil fuels problematic. I have worked 20 years in developing countries on poverty issues. Most poor people will buy advanced cooking stoves and fuels on their own if they perceive they need it as they find the money.  

I can see perhaps in the very  worst of situations of large urban air quality situations it might make sense but when its such a low priority need ranking of the poor and cultivates dependency.... it's a fools game subsidizing the extractive energy industry. The poor could use that same donor cash for more urgent needs like food security and health care or even livelihood projects that could make them more financially independent. 

Why don't you do a more comprehensive study that compares human well being changes where the poor get to choose between fossil fuel cooking subsidies vs their other priority needs and monitor health and well being impacts over a longer period. 

With how fast solar power prices are coming down about 20%/yr it seems to me that the lifecycle cooking costs of electric cooking with well insulated pots will become increasingly attractive fo urban areas in the next 3-5 years. Why not spend the money on piloting electric cooking strategies with integrated heat retention devices to minimize energy demands.  

I think we can make progress on urban air quality issues but that subsidizing fossil fuel cooking systems is a low sustainability strategy to address the problem.   

best regards

Roger Samson 

--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 5/26/17, Karin Troncoso <karintroncoso at gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [Stoves] [Stoves Digest, Vol 81, Issue 21] Another attack on solid fuels by public health adventurers
 To: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
 Received: Friday, May 26, 2017, 12:26 PM

 Dear Crispin

 The
 note that you cited fro our paper saying that the Philips
 stove reduces
 PM2.5 concentration by only 66% was a cite of the work by
 Muralidharan et al.,
 2015. It is based in a KPT not in a WBT: “Here, we tested a
 traditional clay chulha cookstove (TCS) and five
 commercially available ACSs,
 including both natural draft (Greenway Smart Stove,
 Envirofit PCS-1) and forced
 draft stoves (BioLite HomeStove, Philips Woodstove HD4012,
 and Eco-Chulha XXL),
 in a test kitchen in a rural village of western India.
 Compared to the TCS, the
 ACSs produced significant reductions in particulate matter
 less than 2.5 µm (PM2.5) and CO concentrations
 (Envirofit: 22%/16%, Greenway:
 24%/42%, BioLite: 40%/35%, Philips: 66%/55% and Eco-Chulha:
 61%/42%), which
 persisted after normalization for fuel consumption or useful
 energy. PM2.5 and CO
 concentrations were lower for forced draft stoves than
 natural draft stoves.
 Furthermore, the Philips and Eco-Chulha units exhibited
 higher cooking
 efficiency than the TCS. Despite significant reductions in
 concentrations, all
 ACSs failed to achieve PM2.5 levels that are considered
 safe by
 the World Health Organization (ACSs: 277–714 μg/m3 or 11–28 fold higher
 than the WHO
 recommendation of 25 μg/m3;)”

 The objective of our paper was not to
 support LPG
 industry, but to show that LPG subsidies have helped to give
 access to this
 clean fuel (clean from a health perspective) to the poor in
 countries like
 Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and El Salvador. As we wrote,
 there are many
 barriers for the use of LPG, and infrastructure and
 willingness to use it are
 some of them. The paper was not intended to evaluate solid
 fuels stoves performances;
 the proposition is a simple one: some countries in LAC have
 been giving
 subsidies to LPG for many years, what are the results? Do
 those countries have
 less use of solid fuel for cooking than expected? Yes, they
 do. 

 The implication is only that helping
 the poor to buy
 clean fuels may be part of the solution towards universal
 access to clean
 fuels.

 Until today, there is not a solid fuel
 stove that
 reduces exposure enough as to comply with the WHO guidelines
 for indoor air
 quality. It is a high standard. It is hard to reach. You may
 choose to believe
 that it was settled for some obscure purposes but I believe
 that they are
 evidence’ based. If there are new technologies than can
 achieve dramatic
 reductions in PM2.5 exposure using solid fuels, that would
 be great news,  if you have evidence like the study from
 Fresh
 air and the World Bank to share, I would appreciate it. I
 definitely think that
 the solution it’s not a single one and it will be a
 combination of policies,
 strategies, fuels and technologies. Targeted subsidies to
 LPG and electricity may
 be part of the solution. 

 I have been researching adoption of
 fuels and technologies
 to cook for the past 10 years. As part of my work, I have
 interviewed hundreds
 of women in Latin American countries and I have found that
 the economic
 barriers overcome the cultural barriers to the adoption of
 clean fuels. Many
 women have expressed their wish to be able to afford LPG to
 cook. I think that
 we have to keep in mind their wish to have access to the
 same benefits that we
 already enjoy, when considering solutions for the poor.

 Best Regards

 Karin

 Dear
 Friends

 In case there be any doubt as to the nature of the war on
 solid fuels, here is
 a street-legal extract from the paper mentioned below:

 ?Though the reasons underlying [use of solid fuels] are
 complex, it has been
 shown to be highly associated with poverty and the lack of
 access to clean
 fuels. Access to clean fuels is difficult to address, given
 that individuals
 may not have the financial resources to buy Liquefied
 Petroleum Gas (LPG) or
 electricity, even when available in their communities. For
 this reason, most
 solutions proposed in poor areas have been focused on
 ?making the available
 clean? (i.e. to burn biomass cleanly in improved biomass
 stoves), rather than
 on ?making the clean available? (Smith and Sagar, 2014). On
 account of a better
 combustion, improved biomass stoves have higher efficiencies
 a lower emissions
 of kitchen smoke, while still relying on solid fuels that
 are accessible and
 generally free. These new improved biomass stoves vary
 enormously, but none
 have yet been shown to sufficiently reduce exposure to PM2.5
 to comply

 with the WHO's Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality (Smith
 and Sagar, 2014).
 Research on exposure-response shows that the use of LPG
 leads to concentrations
 of PM2.5 below the critical level of 10 ?g per m3, whereas
 concentrations
 measurements in homes with improved biomass stoves have
 shown an annual average
 of 170 ?g per m3 (Johnson and Chiang, 2015; WHO, 2014b).
 Even the Philips
 stove, the most advanced biomass stove in the Global
 Alliance for Clean
 Cookstoves (GACC) catalogue, reduces PM2.5 concentration by
 only 66%
 (Muralidharan et al., 2015). This highlights the importance
 of ensuring access
 to clean fuels and not just improving the combustion and
 efficiency of biomass
 stoves. In LAC 90 million people?

 There are a lot of things worthy of comment in this one
 paragraph.

 For a start:

 ?PM2.5 below the critical level of 10 ?g per m3 ?

 What? 10 ?g per m3 is so extraordinarily low that no one
 will meet it. If it is
 true that we are all doomed to expire for breathing air
 containing generic
 PM2.5 above that level, we can give up now.

 Who says the Philips stove is the most advanced? Reduced
 what by 66%? Exposure?
 Against what baseline? In who?s kitchen? The GACC?s ?stove
 catalogue? rates
 performance based on the WBT which contains so many
 conceptual and calculation
 errors that it renders all test results irrelevant! How may
 times must that
 conversation be held? Simply correcting the major
 calculation errors in the WBT
 moves the stoves around the chart dramatically. If Berkeley
 can?t do math and
 the GACC won?t fix it, we should simply move on to some
 rating method that
 reflects reality. The entire stove community cannot continue
 to be held hostage
 to incompetence that happens to serve select groups.

 The statement that people use solid fuels because of a lack
 of access to ?clean
 fuels? assumes that solid fuels are ?unclean?, haram,
 unwanted, untouchable:
 Dalit fuels. There are numerous cases where liquid and
 gaseous fuels are
 available and shunned in favour of solid fuels. The reason
 is often economic,
 but that does not mean ?poverty?. Just economy.

 LPG is not acceptable to some people, even whole regions. It
 is logistically
 unacceptable in many regions, and we do not exist to give
 subsidies to Big Gas.
 Biogas, wood gas and coal gas are perfectly viable
 alternatives to LPG which is
 expensive. The industry that supplies it is highly tied up
 with a very small
 number of distributors. It would cut millions of jobs out of
 energy industries
 were it to become ?required?.

 ?Making the available clean? is obviously the sensible path
 to take. The
 paragraph proposes, in toto, that solid fuels cannot be
 burned cleanly, and
 further, that liquid and gas fuels can, and are, and are
 safe doing so (this is
 all about protecting the public, right?). Note the
 confabulation of indoor air
 quality and unvented stoves with chimney stoves and outdoor
 air. This
 technique, or trick if you must, tries to give the reader
 the idea that because
 a stove that emits all its smoke indoors, it cannot be made
 clean enough with a
 chimney to produce an outdoor PM2.5 level that is
 acceptable. Key to this
 untruth is the claim that stoves with chimney cannot be
 clean burning (no
 technological improvement is possible) and that they leak so
 much smoke from
 the stove that the IAQ problem will persist at least in a
 modeled fraction of
 kitchens that is above some arbitrary level.

 If you did not follow this last point, have a look at how
 the WHO?s exposure
 model works. The estimate that there are really good and bad
 kitchens and
 stoves and the model is set up to always estimate that some
 combination of bad
 kitchens and stoves exist, therefore there will always be
 ?failing?
 combinations. These may not exist at all, but they exist in
 the Monte Carlo
 Simulations so by gum they probably exist in real life.

 To always have some kitchen-stove combinations fail, they
 heroically assume
 that an average 25% of the emissions leak from chimney
 stoves, and that there
 are no clean burning fires in all stoves fitted with
 chimneys. Because it is so
 obvious that a reasonably clean burning stove with a
 reasonable chimney such as
 is found throughout Asia would leak basically zero smoke
 into the room (while
 burning a solid fuel) some excuse has to be invented not to
 do the obvious. I
 say obvious because millions, or billions of people across
 Asia and North
 America already figured this out and put chimneys on their
 heating and cooking
 stoves. This invention apparently didn?t reach California.

 ?These new improved biomass stoves vary enormously, but none
 have yet been
 shown to sufficiently reduce exposure to PM2.5 to comply
 with the WHO's
 Guidelines for Indoor Air Quality (Smith and Sagar, 2014).?

 Finally some relief, thanks to Fresh Air (Netherlands), Dr
 Talant Sooronbaev
 and the World Bank?s Kyrgyzstan heating stove pilot
 programme. Together they
 definitively showed that solid fuel stoves can be locally
 made and installed by
 local contractors and supplied with local fuels and operated
 by local people
 and that the exposure to PM2.5 can be reduced from a 24 hr
 level of 200-800
 ?g/m3 to 10-40. (There is a range because even walking
 through the house with
 boots on can raise the level to 100 for a few minutes. A lot
 of cooking creates
 an exposure well over 40 so we have to be at least a little
 realistic about
 what constitutes a ?health protective? level.)

 Good, then. It is settled. The claim that solid fuels are
 not being able to be
 burned cleanly enough to protect health is definitely
 disproven.

 The starting and finishing positions of this paper needs to
 be corrected in
 light of the clear evidence contradicting them.

 Regards

 Crispin

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[Stoves] ***SPAM*** Re: [Stoves Digest, Vol 81, Issue 21] Another attack on solid fuels by public health adventurers

[Stoves] SPAM Re: [Stoves Digest, Vol 81, Issue 21] Another attack on solid fuels by public health adventurers