[Stoves] Fwd: [stove and climate] The Economist weighs in

[Paul Anderson]

Stovers,

Please read the message below from Kirk Smith, and the recent article 
from The Economist.

I add:  Both Smith and the Economist totally ignore the proven 
capabilities of the TLUD stoves, which are gas-burning stoves that make 
their own gas from the dry biomass fuels that both Smith and the 
Economist recognise as being abundant, locally available, and affordable 
(using about half of the same fuel that the families are currently using.).

And the West Bengal Champion TLUD stove projects, now with 38,000 stoves 
in daily use, are financially beneficial to the low-income households, 
earning money with the sale of the charcoal by-product and the sale of 
verified carbon offsets.  TLUD stoves would be a major "social 
inversment" and not a "subsidy".

Paul

-- 
Doc  /  Dr TLUD  /  Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu
Skype:   paultlud    Phone: +1-309-452-7072
Website:  www.drtlud.com



-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	[stove and climate] The Economist weighs in
Date: 	Sun, 8 Apr 2018 17:50:02 -0700
From: 	Kirk Smith
To: 	



Mostly about Africa, but does, somewhat reluctantly, admit that India is 
making serious progress.  Important corrections/additions to the India 
portion are that the (now) 36 million new connections under the national 
program since 2015 count only those newly provided to below-poverty-line 
households and are on track to achieve 80+ million by 2020.  This is 
coming up to half a billion poor people, if achieved.  This is on top of 
“normal” growth in the middle class, which will probably equal some 30 
million households in his period.

The /Economist/ of course does not like subsidies, as is clear in the 
article, but this article fails to fully acknowledge India’s work to 
transform “subsidy” to “social investment” in this sector, through much 
more efficient targeting.   In addition, through its first initiative as 
part of the new set of national LPG programs, the Give It Up campaign, 
the net impact on government expenditure overall will be essentially 
zero compared to maintaining subsidies as they were.   A brilliant and 
somewhat magical transformation of an awkward embarrassing drag on the 
economy (subsidies) to direct social investment for the poor.

Much more to be said and by no means without problems, but too bad the 
Indian program did not receive more coverage here. Good to see this 
article, but from the /Economist /standpoint, one might think a 
transformed vision of “subsidies” via modern IT is the bigger story/k

/Economist/, April 5, 2018

How the other half cooks: Household smoke may be the world’s deadliest 
environmental hazard**

/Global campaigns have failed to change how poor people heat their food/

https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20180407_FNP003_0.jpg

  Print edition | International 
<https://www.economist.com/sections/international>

SOKONE, SENEGAL: IMAGINE building a small pile of wood and kindling in 
the smallest room in your house, and setting fire to it. You can keep 
the door open, to let out some smoke, but cannot switch on an extractor 
fan. You must tend the fire for an hour. Repeat the process three times 
a day.

This is how Fatou N’Dour lives. Her kitchen, separate from her home and 
built of mud bricks, measures roughly two metres by two. She usually 
cooks indoors because of the winds that whip across Lambayene, the 
village where she lives in central Senegal. Asked about ventilation, she 
points to a hole in one wall, which is about ten centimetres square. 
Other women in the village cook rice, couscous and meaty sauces in 
similar conditions, using wood from a nearby forest.

Wood and charcoal in Africa; coal in East Asia; wood and animal dung in 
South Asia—in much of the world, food is heated by burning primitive 
solid fuels. Each fire is tiny, but the International Energy Agency 
(IEA), a Paris-based research group, estimates that 5% of the world’s 
primary energy demand in 2016 was supplied by “traditional solid 
biomass”. Wind turbines and solar panels combined generated less than 
half as much energy.

The awful effects of these fires begin with their impact on human 
health. Household smoke is thought to be the world’s most lethal 
environmental problem, killing 2.6m people a year. Where wood and 
charcoal are burned, trees often disappear. Africa loses some 0.5% of 
its forests every year, a higher rate of destruction than South 
America’s. Soot from domestic fires also warms the planet, particularly 
when it settles on snow. Black carbon like that from dirty cookstoves is 
thought to be the third most important cause of climate change after 
carbon dioxide and methane.

Governments, aid agencies and charities have for decades tried to coax 
people towards cleaner fuels like liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and 
electricity. Those who must burn wood and dung are prodded to do so in 
more efficient stoves.

Progress has been astoundingly slow. Since 2000 the number of people 
living in extreme poverty has plunged from 1.7bn to about 600m. Neonatal 
deaths have fallen by 49%. Yet the number of people heating their food 
with dirty fuels has stuck at 2.5bn-2.8bn, according to the IEA, largely 
because of growth in Africa (see chart). The Global Alliance for Clean 
Cooking, which uses a slightly different measure, estimated in 2015 that 
the number might even have risen. As for those improved cookstoves, 
researchers who hand them out in a village almost invariably find, when 
they return several years later, that people have gone back to cooking 
over handmade mud stoves or large stones.

https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20180407_IRC157.png

That efforts to change how people cook have fallen so short for so long 
can be blamed on weak markets, unco-ordinated charity interventions and 
muddled priorities. It also illuminates why development is so much 
harder in Africa than in Asia.

Cooking over an open fire is no fun, especially if you have to do it 
every day. In another village in western Senegal, Felane, women complain 
that their kitchens are always hot and smoky. The smoke stings and 
irritates—one woman blames it for colouring the whites of her eyes. 
Firewood is becoming ever harder to find. A local man, Cheikh Diouf, who 
has nine children, says that wood-collecting may take four trips a week, 
each one of up to four hours.

Those who have a simple metal cookstove with a clay liner, known as a 
/jambaar/, say it is better than the traditional method of balancing a 
pot over three big stones atop a fire. The/ jambaar/ is more efficient, 
needing less wood. Surveys in other countries show that many poor women 
realise this. A /jambaar/ can also be moved outside when the weather 
allows. And it just feels superior: one woman in Lambayene describes it 
as “civilised”.

Yet /jambaar/ stoves are seldom on sale at the weekly markets. People 
seem not even to know how much they cost. Gunther Bensch and Jörg 
Peters, both of the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Germany, 
gave /jambaar/ stoves to Senegalese villagers in 2009. When they 
checked, in 2015, almost all had worn out. Hardly any had been replaced.

The problem is not only poverty. Mr Bensch and Mr Peters have tried 
auctioning /jambaar/ stoves. They found that villagers often bid more 
than they would pay in nearby towns. Perhaps they do not buy them in 
markets because shopping is seen as women’s work, and women are not 
allowed to spend much without consulting their husbands. Or perhaps it 
is too difficult to carry stoves from town to village. One urban stove 
vendor, Malick Niang, says he would not try to sell the stoves in 
villages. They are heavy and breakable, and demand there is uncertain. 
Another problem is that, being safe, poor and French-speaking, Senegal 
attracts charities and aid agencies. Some at times hand out stoves for 
little or nothing. That confuses people about their true value, and can 
wreck markets.

Even better cookstoves may not do much to improve health. The linkage 
between household smoke and harm seems not to be linear, says Kevin 
Mortimer of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Above a certain 
level, breathing more smoke might not make a person much sicker. Even 
the most efficient wood stoves expose cooks to many times the level of 
smoke that the World Health Organisation regards as safe. Mr Mortimer 
was involved in a large trial in Malawi, using a top-of-the-line stove, 
which found no evidence of an effect on rates of childhood pneumonia.

Perhaps it is better to pick a genuinely clean fuel (clean to cook with, 
not necessarily in the planet-preserving sense) and promote it hard. 
Brazil, Ecuador and Indonesia, among others, have all subsidised LPG. 
Since 2016 the Indian government has made LPG available to 34m 
households, giving them gas stoves and one cylinder free. The petroleum 
ministry says that four-fifths of the newly connected households have 
bought a replacement cylinder. On average, they buy four cylinders a 
year, which implies they get at least half of their cooking energy from 
wood, dung and the like. Still, this is rapid progress.

So switching fuels rather than stoves seems the more hopeful approach. 
“We were fooling ourselves, thinking that we could pick any old fuel off 
the ground and make it burn cleanly,” says Kirk Smith, an environmental 
scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is involved 
with India’s programme. Not only is LPG much cleaner than solid fuel. It 
also feels like a step up in the world and is easier to use (even men 
can cook with it).

Subsidies make for poor policy tools. They are snaffled by wealthy, 
well-connected people. They create lobbies supporting them, and become 
hard to cut. Particularly in small countries, subsidised goods are 
likely to leak over borders. Subsidies may also vary from year to year 
with the government’s budget. That is a particular danger in the case of 
cooking fuel, because cooks prize reliability. If people cannot always 
obtain clean fuel, they will probably revert to dirty stuff, says Radha 
Muthiah, the departing head of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.

These are mighty problems even for large middle-income countries with 
more-or-less competent governments. India, which for years frittered 
away money on LPG for the middle class, has managed to steer the 
subsidies—the world’s biggest cash-transfer programme—more accurately 
towards the poor, partly thanks to the Aadhaar biometric-identity 
scheme. But in smaller, poorer, more corrupt countries, LPG subsidies 
are probably out of the question. India has found a tricky, costly way 
of clearing the air. In sub-Saharan Africa, the smoke lingers.

/This article appeared in the International section of the print edition 
under the headline "How the other half cooks"/

Kirk R. Smith, MPH, PhD <krksmith at berkeley.edu 
<mailto:krksmith at berkeley.edu>>

Professor of Global Environmental Health

Director, Collaborative Clean Air Policy Centre, Delhi

747 University Hall, School of Public Health

University of California Berkeley, 94720-7360 USA

510-643-0793; fax 642-5815

http://www.kirkrsmith.org/

-- 
This message (from Smith) was sent to those who are subscribed to the 
Google Groups "stove at lists.berkeley.edu" group.

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