[Stoves] Delhi clean cooking forum meeting

Mon Oct 30 16:26:50 CDT 2017

Anil:

Looking forward to your experiences and reflections.

Registration cost has to be high to keep out riff-raff, no? Besides, you
got treated to neo-imperial dinners of clean intellectual emissions, I
hope.

Food efficiency is a complicated matter.  Food waste can be used for fuel -
char to biodiesel.

1. I will take Kirk Smith at his word about Delhi visibility attributed to
"indoor air pollution", presumably from solid fuel use. I give presumptive
support to Sarath Guttikinda's source apportionment; he has been doing this
for Delhi for more than ten years. I posted an item a few days ago; I
disagree with his opinion about what should come "first", and maybe his
assumptions and methods if/when I see something for the last week. My
general problem is that particulate sources are not well-characterized, and
many pollutant sources are simply ignored or not captured by air quality
monitors. Categorical blame flows not from data but from biases; in this
case, give Prof. Smith benefit of the doubt.

2. There are NO data on deaths (daily or annual) from air pollution, indoor
or outdoor, ground-level or 10, 20, 40 feet above ground. All you have is
attributions, and categorical attribution is - to repeat myself - flows
from biases, the data on deaths, causes of death, on illnesses, all being
rather flaky. People die. Categorical assignation of causes of death and
illness is -- well, I won't repeat myself this time. The GBD is
GobbleDyGook; useful for broad population trends, of zero value for
solutions.

Why, I just got this on my new cereal box - it claims "Heart healthy: While
many factors affect heart disease, diets low in saturated fat and
cholesterol may reduce the risk of this disease."

A corresponding notice on every stove blessed by Prof. Smith as "truly
health protective", there should be this notice: "Healthy: While many
factors affect many diseases, foods cooked exclusively on this stove may
reduce the risk of any of those diseases". I will absolve him of my charges
of health fascism.

I will note without further comment that this PM2.5 hysteria is a product
of a certain group of politicized, ideological "scientists gone rogue" in
the US over the last few years. Prof. Smith was courageous enough to write
opinion pieces like "In Praise of Petroleum," "Power to the People", even
as the real nut cases in science community treat every CO2 molecule as a
weapon of mass destruction. We could not have expected of him that he be
skeptical of the claim that every PM2.5 is a weapon of mass destruction.
Cut him some slack; WHO, Gates Foundation, will have to spend their time
and money doing something real if they didn't have propaganda to grab
attention. Prof. Smith is after all a member of the groupthink group, an
unthinking, unaccountable group.

I will soon post two reviews - of Gold Standard poppycock on aDALYs -
abusing Prof. Smith and Ajay Pillarisetti's seriously hedged modeling work
in service of Goldman Sachs - and of the CASAC group at EPA.

Since "there is no there there", UNF and SE4All have little else to do but
blow smoke rings.

3. I disagree with you about "rural poor" and "electric induction stove".
The past is not the future. Yes, the working poor will most benefit from
your "rural cafeteria" idea and generally from outsourcing cooking. Some of
that cooking will be done by induction stove. I still stand by my piece
"Electric Chaiwalla".

To keep my reputation as a skeptic, let me say this -- At the margin, over
the next 10 years, a greater share of the cooking energy market (thermal
and non-thermal) will be captured by electricity - including induction
heating - than by biomass stoves blessed by the ISO cabal.

4. The rich and famous know nothing about poor people's cooking, nor do
they care. All they want is to cook their own meals and let the poor eat
cake a la mode(l).

To be continued...

Nikhil

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

On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 2:13 AM, nari phaltan <nariphaltan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I just came back after attending the clean cooking forum meeting. I am
> writing detailed articles on my observations and suggestions and hope these
> articles will be syndicated. Here are my cursory impressions.
>
> 1. The data on daily deaths from indoor pollution is suspect. It will
> always be since it is impossible to pinpoint one cause when there are
> millions of causes for death. So the issues raised by Nikhil are valid.
>
> 2. However this scarce has raised the level of engagement of rich and
> famous people - people who would not have thought at all about how poor
> people live. This might have an effect of raising funds and putting people
> to focus on rural poverty.
>
> 3. Also this also has a danger of raising brain-haired schemes like
> electric induction cooking for rural poor. The poor households have never
> seen electricity and now they will supposedly get electricity for cooking!
>
> 4. The LPG program of GOI is in full swing. This gives mileage and brownie
> points to the present administration despite the fact that 90% LPG in India
> is imported (50% imported and 40% produced from imported oil). There are
> serious problems on the ground (both logistics and otherwise) but it looks
> good to brag in international forums.
>
> 5. The registration cost of US $ 300/- was steep and I have no idea where
> it was used. Except we got sumptuous meals (most of the food was also
> wasted) and a big Bollywood tamasha on the gala dinner eve. I do hope the
> excess food (there were innumerable meat dishes) was given to rural poor
> and at least on those days the Delhi air might have gotten less pollution
> from indoor cooking!
>
> 6. The Delhi air was polluted and the visibility was 50-100 meters. Kirk
> Smith told me that it is due to indoor air-pollution and not due to
> vehicular pollution - really taxing the credibility of the data and the man!
>
> 7. I think this jamboree (600 delegates from 50 countries) only resulted
> in deals and invitations to more conferences.
>
> Cheers.
>
> Anil
>
> Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute (NARI)
> Tambmal, Phaltan-Lonand Road
> P.O.Box 44
> Phaltan-415523, Maharashtra, India
> Ph:+91-9168937964 <+91%2091689%2037964>
> e-mail:nariphaltan at gmail.com
>            nariphaltan at nariphaltan.org
>
> http://www.nariphaltan.org
>
> http://nariphaltan.org/about-2/awards/  Awards for NARI staff
> http://nariphaltan.org/nari-in-press/  NARI in press
>
>
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