[Stoves] Fallout from ProPublica piece on the $75 m boondoggle
Nikhil Desai
pienergy2008 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 19 11:19:16 CDT 2018
Dear Crispin:
A three-part answer to your post:
A. I have no basis to judge your claim that State had $25 m for GACC and
same for USDOE. I do have a table that I made a year or so ago from a State
weblink that is no longer active.
Burning money (US $m)
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2015/09/247240.htm
First five years (2010-2015)
Additional anticipated through 2020
Original commitment
Actual spend
State
$ 0.37
$ 6.17
$ -
EPA
$ 6.00
$ 16.54
$ 15.00
USAID
$ 9.00
$ 29.85
$ -
NIH
$ 24.70
$ 36.60
$ 30.00
CDC
$ 1.00
$ 5.43
$ 5.00
DOE
$ 12.50
$ 10.60
$ -
NSF
-
$ 1.75
-
$ 53.57
$ 106.94
$ 50.00
Note: OPIC omitted. It loaned $7m. "For all agencies, all future projected
support is subject to the availability of funds."
>From what I can tell, State, EPA, and DOE contracted with UN Foundation
(remember, GACC cannot be contracted because it has no legal existence).
Just how much of the $107 m to end-2015 or, say, $125+ m went to UNF, under
how many contracts, and when the monies were committed, disbursed, or how
much still remains to be spent, is all a matter of conjecture.
Assuming that USAID, NIH, CDC did not contract with UNF but with their own
other contractors (as did the USDOE, according to your experience as to how
things were expected), it seems entirely plausible that GACC was
UNDERFUNDED, not UNDERCOOKED with $75 million, as Sara Morrison claims
without any evidence.
I was never in love with GACC, but I have been sympathetic to its
leadership. I think Muthiah was handed an impossible job - a plan and a
charge to raise money, so that UNF could earn its overheads. This was to be
UNF's first "service contractor" initiative. (UN obliged, subsequently.)
I think the money wasn't enough and the contract terms were too rigid to
address problems as they arose. GACC spent huge funds on consultant reports
on market prospects in selected countries, and then on conferences,
dinners, travel, and throwing weight around. (You and others on this list
know the shady or sorry tales; I haven't seen anything first hand except
GACC's own statements, which have a putrid smell to anybody who has any
experience with energy policy or aid policy in general.)
That is, there was too little money to do anything substantive, and many
initiatives simply failed. (Like DfID contract for "evidence base", and
some consultant report on "business models" that apparently went nowhere.)
Lack of money went hand-in-hand with too little competence and credibility
(except Hillary's name.)
Still, public monies demand accountability. The real investigative
journalism that ProPublica should undertake is searching the US and
European governments' procurement records to see what GACC was contracted
to do, and what it delivered in return.
Morrison's piece is a hatchet job, that's all. I pity GACC; it is getting
kicked when it is down. (There are many others who probably feel the same
way too.)
--------------
B. Now let me get the other canard out of the way - that LPG needs
subsidies.
1. LPG, like electricity, can be cross-subsidized. That is called price
discrimination. There is no outlay from the public fiscus, and this is how
LPG price controls were financed for decades in India.
2. And only household customers are subsidized in India; even there, not
those who have piped natural gas and those whose tax returns show high
incomes.
3. While there is some "leakage" to transport and commercial users, LPG
availability has helped push cooking out of the households and into
eateries, cafeterias, streetside shops.
Considering the utterly ludicrous fanaticism against fossil fuels - as if
every CO2 molecule, though just from fossil fuel origin, was a WMD - I am
eternally grateful that for the rich country ideologue crowd, Kirk Smith
dared to write "In Praise of Petroleum".
He is quoted as saying he never got so much hate mail in his life. I
believe him. James Hansen was also castigated by his - ahem, peers - for
writing that fossil fuels as a whole seemed to be climate neutral and that
the priority focus of mitigation be on non-CO2 SLGHGs.
Yes, the "scientist" crowd is a herd of myopic stags with blinders, whipped
in a race to publish scarier pieces. Smith and Hansen wrote sensible pieces
that were also credible, and were apparently humiliated. (We have Smith's
word; Han
You ought to read Kirk Smith's own admissions as to how fake the IHME/WHO
quantifications - or aDALYs - are. And of course I disagree with him on his
paeans for Modi or his obsession with "truly health protective" (based on
BAMG boxed-in thinking) and "no stacking". But at least he had the sense to
see the writing on the wall -- with or without his proclamation of their
virtues, gas and electricity were to capture an increasing share of the
cooking market around the world.
He assumed LPG and electricity to be "clean", defined them as such. I have
no problem with that. To me or you it needn't mean that solid fuels cannot
be burned clean; what matters is air quality, not what Kalpana Balakrishnan
cooked up as "concentrations" and then WHO/IHME applied IERs to.
--------------
C. I agree with you on the "kerosene is dirty" meme. It is "dirty" if it is
lit in a little metal can; less so in "hurricane" lanterns or table lamps,
and still less so in pressure vapor lighting. Similarly for cooking. The
fact is, nobody has a good database. (I think Robert van der Plas had a
paper at the World Bank some 30 years ago, with help from Philips, on
kerosene lighting. That is where I got some ml per lumen numbers, if I
recall correctly. But all that was lab test.)
But then, also consider that nobody has a good database on emission rates
in actual life for solid fuel stoves by type of biomass, fuel chemistry,
cooking sequence and power, duration, food, anything. By "good" I mean not
only these variables but also a large enough sample - say 0.05% of
households - and for long enough periods - at least all seasons of a year.
Where does all the vapor of "emissions kill" arise from? Someone should ask
WHO. Its reports on Household Fuel Combustion Guidelines and Burning
Opportunity are good clues to how the GiGo process worked. WHO also
engineered "reviews" of literature that were essentially "fixed" in
advance, but are surprisingly honest about how weak the literature was as
of around 2012. (Not much has happened since.)
Yes, I too "have seen this 'kerosene must be banned along with wood and
coal' meme showing up in new advisory documents, "*because it is just as
inherently dirty*". This whole show is like a bad soap opera: lots of
cunning."
Contractors are hired for cunning. UNF is just one such contractor; ANSI
too. I should be sympathetic to John Mitchell too; I know the pressures to
spend money requires leaning on contractors to deliver eye-catching
results.
Whether WHO is a contractor to UNF or Gates Foundation - another task for
ProPublica.
Nikhil
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831
*Skype: nikhildesai888*
On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 6:55 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
> Dear Nikhil
>
> Thank you for being engaged and observant. I wonder how on earth this
> story escaped the desk of the usual massage therapists.
>
> A couple of things:
>
> The $50m was from the State Department as I recall. I have the
> correspondence. As do the Russians, apparently :).
>
> It was $25m for GACC to get the pot cooking so as to attract more, and $25
> for the DOE to be distributed by none other than Sam Baldwin, head of
> research, not so? The Nov 2014 Hillary-fest in NYC was to raise pledges
> from others, including USAID which a) hates stoves and b) mumbled something
> about money "pending budget availability" which it turned out not to be.
>
> I was a reviewer of five of the grants coming from the DOE's $25m so I
> believe that actually happened. It was divided into two sorts: small and
> large hardware demonstrations and basic research to be done by national
> labs in the US. I researched who was able to apply for these and there is
> some law about the DOE not giving grants to foreign entities. It was
> therefore a surprise to find outsiders were able to apply for some, but
> they added, 'together with a local partner' so that covered it. A twist
> came later when non-US groups were permitted to bid on at least one large
> grant that may have been jointly administered by the DOE and EPA. That
> seems to have evaded the domestic organisation limitation, possibly through
> some EPA technical assistance grant route. Details are illusive because Sam
> was present so it involved the $25m but did not have the hitherto mandatory
> 'local partner' stipulation.
>
> The technique used by GACC was the same as Winrock's: create a 'network',
> get people to sign on as collaborators, and count anything they did as
> 'achieved' contributions to the global goals. Every stove I sell counts
> towards the 1m goal, even now.
>
> Various funders showed up to join as board members and donors to GACC,
> with differing levels of engagement, some only on an earmarked fund basis.
> The World LP Gas Association was always involved. Clean cooking, right? No
> disagreement there. All LPG requires is subsidy. Look at the 'success' in
> Indonesia. 40m new users in two years, right?
>
> LP Gas sent a rep to participate in the writing of the South African
> paraffin stove standard, apparently intent on making it as complicated and
> expensive as possible. Every little bit helps, right? Well-burned kerosene
> is every bit as clean as well-burned LPG so it is more of a direct market
> share threat than miserable wood. What to do? Embed the 'dirty kerosene'
> meme into every moving pen starting in India, 1999. As late as 2015 I
> have seen this 'kerosene must be banned along with wood and coal' meme
> showing up in new advisory documents, "*because it is just as inherently
> dirty*". This whole show is like a bad soap opera: lots of cunning.
>
> Ultra-clean coal combustion, finally admitted by the WHO in Lisbon a
> couple of months ago, is carving a corner for solid fuels, at least for a
> while, until gas "inevitably" takes its place. (Never plan your programme
> on the basis that something is inevitable.)
>
> It turns out the evidence about clean biomass impact is not found for IAQ,
> but is easily found for coal! You have to admit that is sort of
> humorous given the AGW mania swirling around the sector.
>
> Paul Anderson's patient success, and Sujatha, who got shafted in the
> process (in my view) are rather easily brushed aside for not fitting the
> profile of the original vision. Plus, it is not gas, it is gasification.
> Remember this is a State Department exercise fronted by the UNF. What do
> you think their interests are? Where hide the quids pro quo?
>
> One has to be practical about these things. The State Department is going
> to spend its money on American contractors when it can. Consultants deliver
> what's in the contract. Cooperating organisations do the legwork with a
> little help from their friends. The ISO exercise tried very hard to deliver
> an EPA-based test method that kind of, sort of, doesn't invalidate the
> WBT, hedged with some plausible deniability clauses, and there are of
> course, the 'tiers' without which LPG cannot claim to have special status.
>
> The spanners in the works are the super-clean burning TLUD gasifiers, both
> for coal and for wood, and the cross-draft coal burning cooking and heating
> stoves already multiplying without GACC or the EPA. These are both
> technical advances not anticipated by Berkeley or the LP Gas Association.
> Both groups assumed they could rely on poor PM reports for all solid fuels *ad
> infinitum*. Throw in the biochar benefits and coal-based space heating
> IAQ gains, and the cauldron bubbles with unexpected opportunities.
>
> This probably wouldn't have happened without GACC, which brought a lot of
> attention to the 'cause'. Could we/they have been more efficient? Of
> course, but there are agendas everywhere. With (real) globalism all but
> dead, the CAGW movement on the ropes, UN reform nowhere on the horizon, the
> need for international arbitrary power centres outside the Banks and Big
> corporations has never been greater. That, my friend, is not a problem, it
> is an opportunity.
>
> Regards
> Crispin
>
>
> THE WIN-WIN MIRAGE - A $75 million attempt to end indoor air pollution
> ended up siding with fossil fuels
> <https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2F1327615%2Fwhy-does-the-global-alliance-for-clean-cookstoves-promote-fossil-fuels%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4808c2cabf3748371eca08d5eacc0c60%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636673084450516734&sdata=EfmEYdnlQKNCDQP3BNq%2BnQ0U3sszl2rGSZN02Yx8gmU%3D&reserved=0> -
> Akshat Rathi, Quartz, 14 July 2018
>
> Quartz is a rather brash, pretentious webzine by and for millennials who
> have yet to grow up. It seems to have a wide readership and a big
> geographic footprint. So it is significant that one of its reporters picked
> up Sarah Morrison's ProPubica story on GACC and gave it this twist.
>
> The author supposedly has a PhD in Chemistry from Oxford and a BTech from
> ICT, Mumbai, but writes in the most facile manner:
>
> " After spending many of those millions in grants to designers and
> academics, the alliance was able to offer some cookstoves but they hardly
> reduced particulate emissions ."
>
>
> I don't know any evidence of GACC "spending many of those millions in
> grants to designers and academics." This is a canard.
>
> As is the claim, "some cookstoves but they hardly reduced particulate
> emissions ."
>
> There is no evidence whether they did or did not. You can't argue that
> people didn't like the stoves enough touse them and that the stoves hardly
> reduced particulate emissions (except in the trivial sense).
>
> The author then claims,
>
> " Burning propane produces greenhouse gases, which will eventually
> accelerate climate change, but in the short term it cuts particulate
> pollution, which will have immediate benefits on people’s health. "
>
>
> He is illiterate. Kirk Smith and colleagues pointed out in 2000 that GHG
> emissions on useful energy basis are LOWER for propane than for
> uncontrolled woodfuel combustion, so long as all VOCs are also counted
> along with CO2.
>
> Smith and his colleagues said "If one were to put carbon in the atmosphere
> anyway, CO2 is the least harmful of all species, from both climate and
> health viewpoints. The policy implications of this finding are profound."
>
> Indeed. Amen.
>
> The argument of fuel fetishists - renewable biomass versus fossil LPG (or
> fossil-fired electricity) - is facetious. No real cook gives a damn. There
> is too much individual-level optimization of food, nutrition, time, water,
> jobs, childcare, money going on in different contexts of time and space to
> bother with the beancounters of efficiency or GWP. (Besides, I would use
> 20- or even 5-year GWPs any day, to reflect poor people's discount rates.
> Not something stovers give any thought about."
>
> GACC was fueled partly by hubris, partly by cynical exploitation of
> Hillary's name. (I don't believe US government gave $50 m to GACC. Seems
> like another piece of sloppy reporting by Morrison.)
>
> I wonder who picked the "100 million clean cookstoves by 2020" target.
> Jacob Moss? Leslie Cordes? Tim Wirth?
>
> Back in July 2009, I was contacted by a consulting firm that had an
> assignment from "the Secretary's Office" to do a "feasibility report" on "1
> million women entrepreneurs" to sell "100 million" - BUT, if I recall
> correctly - stoves AND solar LED lanterns. I was surprised then that it was
> not from USAID but from the Secretary's office. I laughed off both the
> targets for entrepreneurs and stoves, but suggested that 100 million solar
> chargers for lighting and phones was doable and desirable.
>
> Monies are spent. Not on designers and academics, at least not by GACC. By
> EPA, Winrock, who knows? For all its failures, GACC was designed to fail.
> No surprise that Radha Muthiah and Sumi Mehta have left. The rest have to
> fulfill the contracts and go for greener biomass.
>
> Nikhil
>
>
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