[Stoves] GACC promises and premises: looking back to 2010

[Nikhil Desai]

Tom:

I only said I became a fan of GACC CEO. She has a phenomenal stage
presence. Reminded me of Hazel O'Leary.

I was not and am not a fan of GACC; I still think it's just a money-making
adventure of UN Foundation, which has no competence for such matters and
cannot be trusted with public money.

Yes, I did insult GACC CEO. That's par for the course for Washington; this
is a political town.

Nothing personal. (* below) I will profusely apologize to her if she would
accept my apology but not the condition of my agreement.

When I began again over a year ago, Xavier had posed a query from some
UNHCR official - "What would it take to design a cookstove?" or something
like that. I asked to what objective and for which service standard. I
still don't have an answer. Do you? Does anybody here or at GACC? At EPA?

Then I saw the notice of a Winrock webinar with Michael Johnson of BAMG and
raised some questions, challenging the EPA assumptions of equitoxicity and
the Burnett et al. (2014) IER functions.

Johnson himself readily admitted in the webinar that he had to make heroic
assumptions. I doubt if anybody else here paid attention to him. Burnett et
al. (2014) themselves admitted the limitations of their assumptions, and as
did Kirk Smith et al. (2014) in a paper I haven't yet quoted from.

I don't mind the presumptions about my ignorance; may I please learn just
what you or anybody else finds worth disagreeing with me on and on what
basis of facts or logic?

After all, GACC CEO had said (I am writing from memory) that the evidence
for many claims was weak. Public honesty carries some weight in this town.

++++

Other than that, I have no disagreements with you. I do not know of Global
Environment Fund other than that it has a board near Friendship Heights
Metro station in Bethesda; drove by it but never bothered till a minute
ago. It's a private equity fund manager. If it has something to do with
cookstoves, it might be like Goldman Sachs and C-Quest Capital. I am not
interested unless there is public money is at stake - directly or
indirectly. Private people can mutually agree to do anything they wish.

Nor do I grudge that " For the last 15 years PCIA and GACC have been
instrumental in providing opportunities for the stoves community to meet
and exchange experiences."

I will let you know what Nikhil Patel is up to. This Nikhil can only argue
for moving money, and cares for the use of public money and honesty in
public life. He doesn't care about "stove development" per se; he only asks
how and when "better biomass stoves" will be found useful by a billion
women and create "Healthier Human Environments".

It's not as if a couple of billion people have not died in the last 50
years having inhaled HAP in their childhoods. The cite-o-logy of

Nikhil
------------------

* PS: An aside to Tom and north Americans: I enjoyed listening to Newt
Gingrich (former Speaker of the House ) on C-Span Munk Debate on American
Democracy <http://munkdebates.com/livestream> Thursday night debating the
proposition "Be it resolved, American democracy is in its worst crisis in a
generation and Donald J. Trump is to blame…"

In the video at 1:22:12, Kim Strassel of the WSJ says, "Of course, there
are some things I wish he (Donald Trump) wouldn't say every single day.
...we do, on nearly a daily basis, point out some of the things that he
(Donald Trump) does which, we think, make him a real poopoohead."

Then Newt says at 1:24:00, "Let me just suggest here, that, had they worded
the proposal for the debate differently, it would have been impossible for
us to have any arguments. If they had said that, to use your six-year old's
term, that Donald Trump is a poopoohead and says some really weird things
sometimes, it would've been tough..  If the debate topic had been,
'Resolved, Donald Trump has some edges and they are a little strange, I
would have refused to come up here, I'd've said, 'Are you crazy?" .. "

Although the debate was in Toronto, the debaters are Washington folks in
one way or another. Kim and Newt can call The Donald what they feel like. I
learnt that from my teacher Bob Solow more than 40 years ago, when he
started a discussion with, "If Jerry Ford (then President) wasn't such an
idiot... "

You or anybody - the GACC CEO or UNF President - may call me anything in
public. Please just don't say it in private.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831
*Skype: nikhildesai888*


On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 7:24 PM, <tmiles at trmiles.com> wrote:

> It would be a great surprise to GACC to know that you became a fan of
> theirs. You entered this discussion almost a year ago with several weeks of
> insults and blistering criticism of programs that you seemed to know
> nothing about and refused to personally contact or engage. In the process
> you drove several people off discussion list. A lot of your “revelations”
> are not new to us but simply issues that we try to deal with. There are
> more than 1600 organizations involved in biomass stove development and
> dissemination. For the last 15 years PCIA and GACC have been instrumental
> in providing opportunities for the stoves community to meet and exchange
> experiences. Contextual design is not new but has been practiced by many
> organizations, adapting stoves to local cultural situations. Many of the
> more than 600 stove designs are adapted to particular people and
> circumstances. Programs are inspired for many reasons, not just smoke. For
> example, two Central American programs were started by medical
> organizations to reduce the trauma (burns, skirt fires)they were treating
> that had been caused by cooking over open fires and to reduce smoke in the
> kitchen to improve health overall. You should interview them to see what
> improvement they have seen over the last 10 and 20 years. In some areas
> people have many different stove designs to choose from. Designs employing
> micro-gasification have been under development for more than 20 years. Well
> designed and supported projects using biochar from stoves have been under
> way for about 10 years. Carefully designed cookstove biochar projects have
> been implemented in Africa and Asia with funding from Global Environment
> Fund, EU and others for purposes of restoring land as well as health, food
> security, etc.  Food security has been the theme of GIZ and other stove
> programs for many years.
>
>
>
> So what is it that is new that you are bringing to the stoves community?
> Kirk Smith got the USEPA to support and catalyze stove development starting
> in 2000. How will Nikhil Patel catalyze stove development for the next 17
> years?
>
>
>
> *From:* Nikhil Desai [mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Friday, October 13, 2017 12:30 PM
>
> *To:* Tom Miles <tmiles at trmiles.com>
> *Cc:* Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.
> org>
> *Subject:* Re: [Stoves] GACC promises and premises: looking back to 2010
>
>
>
> Tom:
>
> Thank you. If I don't write a thorough piece, it won't go to anybody.
>
> My writings and my chats belong to different universes. Let me begin a
> conversation, though and see if you or anybody else has a disagreement in
> principle. Our policy choices may differ and we may disagree on how I say
> something rather than that I say anything at all.
>
> If you recall, I became a fan of GACC CEO back in February. I may not like
> some approaches and don't  have factual material in terms of contract
> reports, annual reports, so I have to go by news items and intuition. My
> intuition is that a) she was given an impossible script by her predecessor,
> who in turn was following a script by State and EPA, in particular Jacob
> Moss and Susan Annenberg; b) it is in the nature of charity business such
> as UN Foundation to market false promises based on false premises, and the
> enthusiasm back in 2009-10 was so great, there were bound to be mistakes
> and failures.
>
> Washington, with all its facades and fibs, runs on certain transparency
> and honesty, even now. Rather, I cannot give up on the hope that some of
> the time.
>
> Yes, there are positive contributions - to me, the most positive is simply
> "awareness raising". (I am not being sarcastic. I made fun of dinners at
> the Imperial Hotel or White House South Lawn. But I know that is how
> Washington or New Delhi do business. I cannot suffer them, but hats off to
> GACC to playing that game.)
>
> I will say that some alleys GACC started on are dead-end -- DfID may not
> like my assertion about the "Evidence Base" project, whose results we don't
> know yet, but who knows, it may open up avenues of another kind of search.
>
> And I also don't think the TC-285 bandwagon will go anywhere or that
> public donors should do bulk procurement of cookstoves without regard to
> cooks, fuels, and contexts;  "international standards" for efficiency and
> PM2.5 emission rates is also a dead-end alley.
>
> UN Foundation was a bad choice for hosting GACC, but understandable due to
> Mrs. Clinton's support and the State/EPA history.
>
> If GACC did not directly provide money for, and oversight for, better
> solid fuel stoves, that is one negative. So is UNF interference with energy
> and health related SDGs. So moving GACC out is an idea worth tabling. It
> might even allow for different procurement and reporting procedures.
>
> Moving from cookstoves to fuels and foods is another thought, though I am
> sure many people on this list would disagree, and organizing a program on a
> broader set of problems will be even more difficult. Still, how about the
> principle of considering foods and fuels - and biochar for agricultural
> productivity or fuel markets - over the long term?
>
> Because, if we agree on "Healthier Human Environments" , they are not just
> about smoke sources but about foods. I happen to suspect that mal- and
> under-nutrition have not only life-long consequences but inter-generational
> consequences.
>
> If you are with me so far, please suggest other "positives". I think it's
> a time to go past the reductionist view of stoves as smoke devices, though
> I would also readily concede that material and design break-throughs must
> be worked on to deliver a clean enough cooking energy system to please the
> cook.
>
> You'd never know that pleasing sisters is my life-long passion, would you?
> :-)
>
> Nikhil
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 2:48 PM, <tmiles at trmiles.com> wrote:
>
> We need to recognize the pros and cons of the program. While there are
> aspects of the GACC project that people may disagree with there have also
> been positive contributions. If you are going to do an opinion piece than
> be thorough. Otherwise it’s just conversation.
>
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
> *From:* Nikhil Desai [mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Friday, October 13, 2017 11:07 AM
> *To:* Tom Miles <tmiles at trmiles.com>
> *Cc:* Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.
> org>
> *Subject:* Re: [Stoves] GACC promises and premises: looking back to 2010
>
>
>
> Tom:
>
> GACC aren't open about their history, so why bother asking them about
> their future?
>
> I don't know GACC; am considering writing an opinion piece. Opinions
> welcome.
>
> Nikhil
>
>
> -------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 11:06 AM, <tmiles at trmiles.com> wrote:
>
> You should contact GACC about plans for the future.
>
>
>
> *From:* Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Nikhil Desai
> *Sent:* Thursday, October 12, 2017 9:24 PM
> *To:* Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.
> org>
> *Subject:* [Stoves] GACC promises and premises: looking back to 2010
>
>
>
> List members:
>
> Back in 2010, soon after Mrs. Clinton had announced the creation of GACC
> at the UN Foundation, there was an event on The Martha Stewart Show
> demonstrating clean cookstoves;  Clean Cookstoves Featured on The Martha
> Stewart Show
> <http://www.prweb.com/releases/clean-cookstoves/martha-stewart/prweb4923294.htm>
> .
>
>
>
> Below an excerpt from some promises made at the time and the premises
> behind them.
>
> I have some impressions of where things have gone since then, though not
> quite sure where they stand for how long.
>
> Since WHO was a Founding Partner, I suppose the creation of Guidelines for
> Household Fuel Combustion can be said to have met the goal of developing
> air quality guidelines, but I am not sure. (WHO already had IAQ Guidelines,
> but of relevance to cookstove projects is whether in actual developing
> country residential environments, having emission rate targets for
> individual stoves is an adequate or even useful instrument for achieving
> compliance with indoor air quality guidelines.
>
> As things stand, the Alliance has three more years to go. Any views on
> what it can accomplish in the next three years, or what plans should be
> made beyond 2020 and by whom?
>
>
>
> Nikhil
>
> "The reductions in emissions achieved by clean cookstoves have the *potential
> to create revenues from carbon credits. Stove companies can use this
> revenue to reduce stove prices *or expand into new markets. More broadly,
> the entire clean cookstove supply-chain should be a source of economic
> opportunity and job creation at the local level.
>
> To achieve its '100 by 20' goal, the Alliance w*ill establish industry
> standards; spur innovative financing mechanisms; champion the cause across
> the donor and development communities; develop indoor air quality
> guidelines; address global tax and tariff barriers; field test clean stoves
> and fuels; and develop research roadmaps across key sectors such as health,
> climate, technology and fuels. *
>
> *A thriving global industry for clean cooking solutions** will provide a
> range of long-term benefits for the entire world -- from improving global
> health to combating climate change**.*
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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