[Stoves] Stove types and poverty [Was Rogerio: Pro-publica article out]

[Anderson, Paul]

Crispin,

Your message below did not go to the whole Stoves Listserv, so it is included below.

I agree with most of what you have said.   And congratulations on your progress with funding in Asia.  Wonderful.

I do need to disagree about the meaning of TLUD and WBT.   Basically I am saying that an established acronym should not be twisted into of “related” meaning.     You wrote:
>…harping that any objection to the WBT is an objection to boiling water during at test…

That is NOT the case.   WBT means something, even with its many variations.   But it is not just about any use of water to be boiled in any test.

And regarding TLUD, that is an acknowledged name (by most) and it does refer to biomass stoves of a specific type that happens to be batch loaded and makes charcoal (although some people then burn the char in the same stove).

But as I said, the vast majority of what you wrote is quite appropriate.

There are certainly challenges past, present and future.  Best wishes to us all.

Paul


Doc / Dr TLUD / Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Exec. Dir. of Juntos Energy Solutions NFP
Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu<mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>       Skype:   paultlud
Phone:  Office: 309-452-7072    Mobile: 309-531-4434

From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2018 3:04 PM
To: ndesai at alum.mit.edu; Kirk H. <gkharris316 at comcast.net>
Cc: Anderson, Paul <psanders at ilstu.edu>; Rogerio carneiro de miranda <carneirodemiranda at gmail.com>; 'Cecil Cook (cec1863 at gmail.com)' <cec1863 at gmail.com>
Subject: RE: [Stoves] Stove types and poverty [Was Rogerio: Pro-publica article out]

Dear Kirk

I agree with the negativity angle, however for stalwarts like me who just refuse to give up until we succeed, there are good reasons to harp.

The amount of damage wrought by the WBT on stove projects is so long a list, it cannot be enumerated. Even today, it is causing huge problems as ignorance is substituted for knowledge.  Another almost $15m wasted in Bangladesh. It is not just that particular set of miscalculations, it is the conceptual errors that underlie the major claims of Aprovecho, spread for decades, literally, by a group that does not really know what it is doing.

Nikhil is far more radical than I am in his elementary objections to what the “stovers” are doing. He is correct, of course.  Look at what Paul (copied here) is doing re the name “TLUD”. This obsession with trying to reserve common technical words for particular implementations is a glimpse into what we face in the field. The term WBT is now, unfortunately, taken to mean a particular type of WBT, so we have Ron Larsen harping that any objection to the WBT is an objection to boiling water during at test and other such silly musings.

The adults in the room have a responsibility to set some things straight, after clear indications that the children have no intention of doing so. The issue with the miscalculation of WHO emission targets is yet another case in point. They just made stuff up, planted a claim here and there in papers, touted them, buried the subterfuge in baffle-gab and will now go on to make up something else that suits their agenda. It is ridiculous.  Someone should take away their piggy bank.

Nikhil’s demand is simple: accept Kirk Smith’s challenge to the stove community and stop belly-aching about lack of support. Show us a modern stove that performs well that people want to buy and use. Tell us which people. Show us. Paul is on the verge of that, if faddism doesn’t poison the well.

The Stoves List has some conversations, but that is not where the adults meet to talk, and that is because it gets derailed into discussions of this or that fad and how everything should be sacrificed to serve it. For the most part, people are guessing and hoping and wishing they understood. We run huge, expensive projects. They are not created according to fetishes or fads – to the extent we can prevent it. Yet still they are not given air to breathe. See the example from Nikhil. We are this close to losing all funding for all stoves in the entire donor world. Why? Failures, upon failures, upon failures, as clown after clown pretends they know enough about social anthropology and combustion engineering, materials science and fuel chemistry, food preparation and low income communities to happen upon a $5 that will save the world.

I am writing up the Kyrgyzstan experience because it is the culmination of 11 years of trying really hard to solve the heating crisis in Asia, and getting some pretty solid results for the first time over the past year. This is very cutting edge stuff, particularly on the anthropological and combustion theory side. We are getting people’s attention. So they are handing us $5m starting January. That is just to expand the pilot. We have $80m in process for Hebei. I call that “starting to gain recognition”. We could have had $120m but time ran short. It is a pilot so when we go big, a few billion, we will catch up.

That kind of funding shows respect. Respect is earned: neither claimed nor given. As we have failed to gain respect for cooking stoves, we are having a little success with heating stoves. With the ISO Cooking stove standard hanging over the cooking stove market like the sword of Damocles, it is perhaps time to concentrate on spaces were there is less interference.

Gotta get back to work
Crispin

From: Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com<mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com>>
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2018 2:49 PM
To: Kirk H. <gkharris316 at comcast.net<mailto:gkharris316 at comcast.net>>
Cc: Paul Anderson <psanders at ilstu.edu<mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>>; Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com<mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>>; Rogerio carneiro de miranda <carneirodemiranda at gmail.com<mailto:carneirodemiranda at gmail.com>>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Stove types and poverty [Was Rogerio: Pro-publica article out]

Kirk:

This can go on-list if you or anybody else wishes. I have deleted some earlier trail.

There ARE "sucesses", but have not been detailed or forgotten. Except for a World Bank research paper - "What Makes People Cook With Improved Stoves" (Douglas F. Barnes, Kirk R. Smith, Keith Openshaw, maybe Robert van der Plas) circa 1993/4, I do not know of any multi-project review that is done by field interviews. (I think the Barnes paper authors individually had experience with stoves projects but none except Robert had a direct hand in any particular project. Also, I think the primary material was collected by surveys done for the paper, so it was not secondary and tertiary material).

I would be happy to be proven wrong. I know of some multi-project evaluations by GVEP, South Asia Development Cooperation or something, Southern Africa Development Cooperation or something, perhaps Kuala Lumpur research center on Asia-Pacific, and by Mary Louise Gifford, and some references in the last five years as a part of GACC-sponsored research. ALL those and others that I know - maybe gtz/giz some years back - are done on secondary and tertiary materials, mostly desk research.

If you agree with me that cooking is contextual, user preferences trump global goals, you might also agree with me that such evaluations are rubbish. For example, if they do the evaluations and say, "Trees were not saved," what use is it to anybody?

So, evaluations done for a faddish objective don't answer the basic question -- What did the users want and why didn't they get it?

Let me give you a great example of rubbish - the famous MIT Department of Economics "study" on the supposed "failure" of improved cookstoves in Odisha, India. This was a long-term (one year or more) field study for a kid's PhD thesis at MIT; she got a job at Harvard. Her co-authors are luminaries.

The paper was utter nonsense. They had no theory of health, and their own data showed that people had different patterns of use than they had expected (without basis). What is worse, their own data belied their conclusions.

That was the first instance - five years ago - that I realized GACC had foes. One of the co-author was a Washington "insider" and had shared the copy of the paper with the Washington Post in advance, so that the instant the paper was put on MIT website, the Post had a story put on Washingtonpost.com website.

I will spare you the details of my outrage at that paper. The MIT know-nothings had picked out a stove design that had long been abandoned by the stove designer. All they had was an ideological purpose.

This has been compounded over and over again in the last ten years - some kid, like this Sarah Morrison of ProPublica, going on a "poverty tourism" project, grabbing some photographs and doing some interviews, and writing up how stove projects have failed.

Well, GACC got what it asked for. If you promise the sky, it may fall on you.

I am not saying there aren't great failures. That paper three years ago in the Indian magazine Carvan, "Up in Smoke" was an excellent story of a nearly monumental folly of Indian programs for woodstoves. For 30 years people have been pointing out that Delhi bureaucrats are doing things wrong. But they continue to be obsessed by some fad or another - in more recent years, Advanced Biomass Stoves that Kirk Smith had played up - but have not yet figured out that for a country as diverse as India, contextuality has to be defined very diligently, and holding Clean Cooking Forum in New Delhi last year was a tragicomedy.

How then does one go about validating successes and failures? In my view, by going and talking to people. And holding back one's biases and pre-conceptions, often driven by the conditions of research grants where one has put in bubbly claims.

Yes, all of us know which side our bread is buttered on; we lick that side, and show the other to the world.

By "going and talking to people" I realize problems of travel and language. With some help, it shouldn't be too difficult to get videos from around the world of what the local conditions are for fuels, cooking methods, residential design, air pollution (people's subjective judgments), stove types, and priorities.

But that does not satisfy the hunger of self-righteous fads.

Here is something I just found yesterday - Improved Biomass Cook Stoves for Climate Change Mitigation? Evidence of Preferences, Willingness to Pay, and Carbon Savings<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocuments.worldbank.org%2Fcurated%2Fen%2F968101530190662253%2Fpdf%2FWPS8499.pdf&data=02%7C01%7C%7C6964c992394141c4ca9308d5f3287f74%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636682277615727234&sdata=CWTfyNK3rW%2BpeVZW0hkkmGcY0cj%2FGZnAtJ2s05gc1%2F8%3D&reserved=0>   Sahan T. M. Dissanayake*, Abebe Damte Beyene, Randall Bluffstone, Zenebe Gebreegziabher, Gilbert Kiggundu, Shannon H. Kooser, Peter Martinsson, Alemu Mekonnen, Michael Toman.June 2018, World Bank Working Paper Series.

Haven't yet read it. I am guessing it took three  years and $300k+ to put this paper out in public. It probably confirms that the Mirt stove was a success but it is not widely available. Go figure -- why is it not widely available? (Hint: I think it needs to be made locally with cement. Rather simple, but not so simple. Read on.)

This is for the Mirt woodstove for injera making in Ethiopia. Mirt means "the best". It is not useful for most other cooking, for which low-income people use charcoal.

I happen to have accidentally observed how this stove was developed. There was a mason from Scotland, first name Steve. He and I were contracted to work on different parts of a World Bank project by different companies. He was with Energy for Sustainable Development, who had also hired Stephen Joseph, a visitor to this list.

I met Steve Joseph there - his charming handshake, "Glad to meet an Indian Jew. I am an Australian Jew, Steve Joseph!" - and other people on the ESD stove project, in the Ethiopian Energy Authority, ESD advisors and managers, stove project staff.

But it was the mason Steve who taught me the complexities of material science and temperature, along with wood types and combustion. (He was specifically testing for eucalyptus wood, which was abundant because of plantations around Addis to reduce deforestation).

Looks like Mirt was a success. As was a charcoal stove developed, tested and marketed by the same group.

But at the end of the Bank project, it was all over. (I had prepared an Urban Household Energy Strategy covering LPG, charcoal, electricity, wood, and supply chain efficiency improvements, with two criteria - "fuelwood deficit" and "total household energy budget". There was to be a follow-on project. Didn't happen for 10-12 years.)

And because the Ethiopia project ended just after the deadline for the Barnes, et al. (1994) paper, and because injeras are special to Ethiopia, few people came to know about this success.

Twenty five year later, electric mtads (injera-baking stoves) have captured the injera market for much of urban Ethiopia, and people buy injeras instead of making them at home. Addis-baked injeras flown to Washington, DC three times a week.

What bothered me most 25 years ago was that there was no "follow on" activity to hold on to the local staff who had gained knowledge and experience, to monitor, to continually innovate, to brand and extract royalties on sales. It was a 3-4 year effort - continued a couple of years more by the consulting company from own funds and some charity funds - that did not extend to rural areas it seems. (I will read this recent paper later.)

Stoves list is not about people who actually do project implementation; they don't bother with single-dimensionalism and mere technical principles. From what I can tell, there is also never any discussion of fixed stoves and residential design. I rarely see any discussion of implementation problems from the field.

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

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 8:34 PM, Kirk H. <gkharris316 at comcast.net<mailto:gkharris316 at comcast.net>> wrote:
Nikhil,

Thank you for your response.  I appreciate your candor.  I guess I am tired of all the statements of failure on the list.  It was good to have Crispin and you point out the positive things you have done.  The negativity focusing on failure seems to dominate, and yet I know there are a lot of positives that go unmentioned.  I see Dr. Anderson, the others I mentioned, and more that I have not mentioned doing wonderful things and the list seems overwhelmed with how much we have failed.  I had hoped the list would be people I could exchange ideas with.  I see no reason to continue with this list if it is dominated by negativity.

I don’t know how Stoves list was listed twice.  All I did was respond to all.

Respectfully,
Kirk H.




Sent from Mail<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgo.microsoft.com%2Ffwlink%2F%3FLinkId%3D550986&data=02%7C01%7C%7C6964c992394141c4ca9308d5f3287f74%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636682277615727234&sdata=3KogTFfM2KyFH%2B0H7NrQd8btvIufM6qzB3%2Fwn%2B5L4YY%3D&reserved=0> for Windows 10

From: Nikhil Desai<mailto:ndesai at alum.mit.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2018 3:46 PM
To: Kirk H.<mailto:gkharris316 at comcast.net>
Cc: Paul Anderson<mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>; Crispin Pemberton-Pigott<mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>; Rogerio carneiro de miranda<mailto:carneirodemiranda at gmail.com>

Subject: Re: [Stoves] Stove types and poverty [Was Rogerio: Pro-publicaarticle out]

Kirk: (Off list)

I am energy and environmental economist, and have done due diligence for projects, plus public finance and budgeting. I am no good for individual small-scale projects, and generally stay away from favoring particular products. When I specifically supported Paul Anderson's work, it was to endorse the principle of char-making and using pyrolysis gas. How that Champion Stove can be adapted to different fuel types and qualities, different cooking practices and scale, I do not know, but that is how products are proven in the marketplace, and where public money is concerned, it is heck of a lot more difficult than venture capital finance for startups.

That the Clean Cooking Working Capital Fund - stay tuned for my comments, once I have listened to the Webinar - failed is not my concern. It is the reasons for failure that may be worrisome. GACC had a hype and an aura, that too didn't bother me. What I think went wrong is that people pulled money when Hillary lost. If I am correct, that confirms the hollowness of the whole GACC propaganda of "market based" approach. They didn't know squat about economics and business.

GACC proved that money can be wasted. That  (including experts' cockiness that they knew how to save forests and lives) is a terrible legacy, far worse than all the technical failures of the past. Engineers need breathing space, but then the term "breathing space": was appropriated by Shell Foundation, in order to spread Kirk Smith propaganda.

See this video where the narrator says, "Globally, exposure to indoor air pollution causes the premature deaths of 1.6 million people every year. That is one person every 20 seconds." Followed by Smith's rattling off "associations". He does admit, "Wood CAN be burned very cleanly. It has almost no contaminants in it."

The issue is not whether it has contaminants but whether they enter into people's bodies.

Oh, well. Kirk Smith is ok so far as his advocacy for gas and electricity goes, but he is absolutely wrong about wood stoves not being "truly health protective" and about his enviro-totalitarianism of "no stacking":

The problem does not really lie with engineers and WBT. GACC played EPA game for WHO.

N

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



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