[Stoves] Follow-up about clean biomass fuels

[Nikhil Desai]

Andrew:

I wish Kirk Smith had kept his message brief and simple - "Currently
available household combustion technologies generate very high level of
health pollutants and may expose up to three billion people to extremely
high pollutant doses. Gaseous fossil fuels and electricity, including from
fossil fuels, have a high market potential for households and commercial
customers and can help lower disease incidence or health care costs."

This is not "shooting for the moon." Companies in the energy sector have
known this for than a century, worldwide.

Why, I have an essay in my language by a young woman writing in 1947 - that
she imagines cooking with nuclear electricity in an independent India.

Prof. Smith discovered the energy sector only around 2012 - when he claimed
he had a new paradigm - from "Cleaning the available" (better combustion
technologies and control technologies) to "Making the clean available."

Duh! What an epiphany of the self-evident.

In so doing, he didn't have to go to the rather untenable position of a
blanket rejection of biomass stoves not being "truly health protective" and
ruling out coal altogether. (There is a WHO Europe report on solid fuel
heating where Zoe Chafe and Kirk Smith do  make a grudging concession that
coal heating is here to stay.

He made a Faustian bargain with WHO, IHME in cooking up an "emissions
database" (a collection of disparate small-scale studies with almost no
information on fuel quality and combustion technology other than
"three-stone fire"), "exposed population" (estimates of people using solid
fuels of any kind with any technology in any location), "concentration"
(estimates using a dubious model in turn based on individual monitors in
617 households in India over a 4-6 month period, applied to the whole
world), and worst of all, an Integrated Exposure Response function,
force-fitting data across lands and over time on PM2.5 from smoking,
second-hand smoking, ambient air pollution and household air pollution.

Or rather, inventing data - calculating PM2.5 from CO, or from TSP, in some
spotty studies - as Burnett et al. (2014) honestly admit. A 2014 WHO Expert
Meeting on PM2.5 in Bonn rightly had reservations about use of IERs.

He dared to write "In Praise of Petroleum" and "Power to the People". And
to shoot for the moon. I have no problem with that. But he need not have
engaged in the puffery of GBD and fakery of aDALYs.

Nikhil







On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 7:06 AM, Andrew Heggie <aj.heggie at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 9 October 2017 at 18:37, Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Keeping the message simple -- that market opportunities are being lost,
> and
> > that even in India, LPG and electricity will not capture even 50% of the
> > total cooking and heating market any time soon
>
> Simple and brief is best for me!
>
> The fact that clean electricity or gas can never be afforded by many
> in the short to medium term , if at all, is what makes me thing
> improved stoves remain a necessary goal.
>
> In Kirk Smith's position I suspect I would be the same as him in
> promoting gas and electric cooking even if it is shooting for the
> moon.
>
> Andrew
>
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