[Stoves] About LPG and India and biomass stoves

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Paul and All
>As people requested, I posed the same challenge to the biomass stove community this year as I did to the LPG community in 2014.   See attached.

Why has he not indicated an equal challenge to coal burning stove producers? There are something like 500m people who are dependent on coal and for historical reasons, they have not received the attention that is their due.

Instead of calling upon designers to get with the programme and produce ultra-low emission burners for every fuel in popular use, we instead are treated to a litany of statements such as ‘coal is a dirty fuel’ and ‘coal stove emissions contain many pollutants as a result of incomplete combustion’.

In the case of Kirk, we hear the same thing about kerosene, which he calls a ‘dirty fuel’. It one of the cleanest burning fuels available, with the Japanese developing burners that have no flame at all!

If the plan is to improve health, supposedly by changing combustors, why not change combustion? Why dump the fuel needed by millions?  This monomaniacal devotion to Big Propane undermines credibility.

What is needed are game-changing technologies in each sub-sector, right?  Well, they are already here. Big surprise. So if people want to be opinion shapers and policy advisors they should get with the programme and keep up with developments in the sectors they mess with. Continuing to speak and advise and tout as if we lived in 1997 is not helping address the problem at scale.

I do not care to triple people’s expenses of cooking and keeping warm. What a stupid idea. And asking central governments to ‘subsidise’ it is beyond the pale.

The cost of propane is independent of oil, yet we find that the gas industry is so tied together it might as well be a monopoly. In that conjoined state, they raise the price of propane, not on the basis of cost or distribution, but on the basis of an energy equivalent of oil, its major competitor. When the oil price went down, what happened with propane? Oh well….it is not tied to the price of oil…

It is worth investigating what happened in May-June 2008 when there was, suddenly, a global shortage of LPG – the entire planet ran out of propane without notice, not long after the oil price was driven into the sky. This ‘shortage’ had nothing at all to do with availability nor stocks nor distribution problems. They simply turned off the tap and squeezed the entire planet. Even OPEC never got close to such an effective monopoly.

Lo and behold, after 6 week, the LPG was suddenly back in stock all over the world all at once, at a much higher price. In the meantime the cost of charcoal in poor countries had jumped about 20% (within about 3 weeks) due to increased demand from gas users who also had charcoal stoves in the back room. Once that happened, the LPG was much more expensive, and the charcoal price remained high as some people stopped using gas. Big Gas and Big charcoal were laughing all the way to bank ‘because of the oil price’.

Touting for Big Gas is doing nothing more than expanding the reach of the de facto monopoly that already can do what they want with the price, except this time there are governments like Indonesia getting involved, paying billions in subsidies to these companies to make cooking and heating gas ‘affordable’.  Think about it. Who created the need for subsidies? Big Gas, by raising the price because the oil price went up (not because there was excess demand – the market demand is elastic).  So we have a de facto monopoly supplier pushing to get gas adopted, subsidised on a vast scale, then they will again raise the price because of all that new demand. Nice work if you can get it.

Put a limit on it: how many trillions of Dollars should be taken out of the world economy per year to subsidise LPG to poor people who can’t afford to cook using it? One? Three? Eight?

Every fuel is needed. Every fuel can be utilised efficiently in the right circumstances. Blaming a fuel for pollution while ignoring developments in the sector is a sneaky form of lying by omission, capitalising on people’s ignorance of what is possible. Keep them ignorant, take their money.

Paul: This is a bigger question than enthusiasm about making and/or sequestering charcoal. I feel that if you cannot separate the root argument about treating the energy carriers with an even hand, you are going to lose all the other arguments. They are too flakey to catch on yet.  In a similar manner, you cannot expect ‘carbon trading’ to ‘pay for’ innovations that are not economically viable at scale, right now. The inherent value of a traded ton of CO2 is nearly nothing. There are just too many simple and cheap ways to remove CO2 from the air, if that is even advisable. You should get your message simplified and go after these guys hammer and tongs. Just because a couple of people say ‘biomass is needed in the short term while we ban all other fuels and promote gas to the point all the countries subsidise it for the poor’ means nothing to hundreds of millions of people who will simply shut them out. This gas crowd is not politically powerful, they are supplicants at the public purse, and the plan is plain wrong. Don’t kow-tow. If they use a ‘health’ argument, go after their numbers because they are entirely cooked up. If they use a ‘deforestation’ argument, point to those countries who take security of supply seriously. (Clearly Kenya and Zambia do not.)

Regards
Crispin the policy protector

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