[Stoves] GACC Webinar (that was, Paul, Ron)

Nikhil Desai pienergy2008 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 8 10:58:44 CDT 2017


Ron:

Re: "what GACC is and has been doing", could you start off a new thread?

Think it's time to ask for a post-2020 budget and business plan (which may
be the idea behind CCF next month)? Given the E&EN/WP stories, escalating
the climate angle may be a good move -- "To hell with this EPA, we are
going to go full blast now with help from European governments and
climate-active foundations."

It is just about ten years since Jacob Moss prepared an unpublished $20 m
business plan to take PCIA to a new host and started talking to UNF, which
wanted to transition to a professional service firm for consulting
projects.

In 2009, he took it to Gina McCarthy, then to Hillary Clinton, whose staff
commissioned an external evaluation of a parallel idea of 1 million women
entrepreneurs selling both cookstoves and solar lanterns.

I happened to be visiting Washington in July 2009 from my exile in the
South Pacific, whence I happen to remember this "cookstoves and lanterns"
plan. I was reminded again by EcoZoom presentation at the webinar. (Yes, I
did listen in and asked a question about pricing strategy and donor demands
for strategy and results, which wasn't answered.)

This was also why I mentioned in a couple of earlier posts that Ivanka,
Chelsea, Melania and Hillary could work together for the next phase of
GACC.

Paul:

Yes, the EcoZoom story was about non-grant retail entrepreneurship and
combining "electricity access", the other contract at UN Foundation, with
"improved cookstoves". If you recall Kirk Smith's second epiphany, one
strong prevalent wind has been - "Biomass stoves are better but not good
enough and in any case they don't command a delivery chain like LPG or
electricity." If not the technology, then the insistence on "market-based",
"results-based" distribution strategies will get in the way of the poor.

For Kirk Smith, this comes through in his insistence on "truly health
protective" (whatever that means, perhaps WHO PM2.5 hourly average emission
rate as tested by Bekeley WBT) and "no stacking" (creating, at least in
India, a two-class society, a cooking apartheid so to speak, with those who
make a complete transition to LPG and the rest quarter billion or so who
wait for savior stoves blessed by WHO).

Sometime between late 2012 and 2014 (from GBD 2010 published in Lancet 2012
to WHO HFC SFU Guidelines), the "clean cookstoves" agenda was hijacked by
WHO for quantification at the stove level, divorced from "women
entrepreneurs", and turned into a marketing campaign for World LP Gas
Association. (I confess I wrote something similar first in 2005/6.) Let's
not kid ourselves. Stoves are local solutions to local problems, varying by
contexts, and the "global" promises are false, based on false premises.
Even for CDR, biochar has to be proven in local contexts for feedstock
quality and alternative uses, revenue streams. (I might go back into the
REDD and LULUCF literature research, but it bores me to sleep.)

Nikhil



On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 3:16 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongretlarson at comcast.net>
wrote:

> Paul and list:
>
> I agree on all you have added.
>
> My purpose in flagging yesterday’s GACC event was to try to get us more
> attuned to what GACC is and has been doing. There aren’t many groups that
> can pull that off for the stove community (certainly not this list). The
> biochar community is served by IBI - with their own regular set of webinars
> - but the biochar community has been somewhat divorced from char-making
> stoves.
>
> By our getting more involved with GACC, we can get more attention paid to
> climate issues I think - with carbon negativity through stoves only
> available with TLUDs.  I can’t see that this aspect of TLUDs is getting
> much attention.
>
> GACC has two more upcoming webinars in roughly two weeks - on LPG and
> solar cooking (18th and 21st).  Which is good.
>
> Something more soon on the Gold Standard.
>
> Ron
>
>
> On Sep 6, 2017, at 10:23 PM, Paul Anderson <psanders at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> Ron,
>
> I attended the webinar.   It was not about stove technology, but about how
> to make a stove company grow.
>
> The webinar was interesting and worthwhile.  But some aspects of EcoZoom's
> history were not mentioned.  And never mentioned is that the stoves are
> made in China by Mr Shen's (Chen's ?) company in conjunction with
> Aprovecho.  So the EcoZoom story of the recent years (the topic of the
> webinar) was about  marketing and  sales challenges and successes.
>
> Paul
>
> Doc  /  Dr TLUD  /  Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
> Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu
> Skype:   paultlud    Phone: +1-309-452-7072 <(309)%20452-7072>
> Website:  www.drtlud.com
>
>
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