[Stoves] An analysis of efforts to scale up clean household energy for cooking around the world

Thu Jul 26 12:26:33 CDT 2018

Crispin:

Jeez. This is rehashing of secondary and tertiary materials to cook up
fancy boxes for rich theories of "change".

I am ready to accept that gas and electricity are "clean fuels" for all
practical purposes, including household cooking. (LPG can be dangerous and
so can electricity - I have seen pictures of open wires stuck into electric
ring hotplate put on top of a mudstove in a Lilongwe neighborhood.)

But, the million dollar question is, what difference did these projects
make to the "breathing space" of the users? What is the evidence that
"clean fuels" led to significant reductions in the exposures of dangerous
pollutants?

The authors accept that "none of these programs was explicitly motivated
by, nor financed for, health gains as a primary goal." If their "clean
household energy for cooking" is not for health gains from improved air
quality (strictly, exposure reduction), what is it for - publishing free
papers for perpetuating cite-o-logy? Why even bother with "clean fuels" if
you have no evidence of "clean as used"? Why go on berating "polluting" and
"more polluting" fuels (unprocessed solid fuels and kerosene) if you don't
really know whether or how they are polluting?

Despite the title, this is not "an analysis of efforts to scale-up". I
haven't yet read the Supplementary Data, but of the 11 "case studies" in
Box 1, I see little "scale-up" to date, which, to me, is a geographically
specific expansion over time.

1. Kenya/Tanzania/Uganda biogas, Rwanda pellets and fan, Cambodia biogas,
China "compressed biomass", Ethiopia ethanol, Nigeria ethanol are too
small, and too young or too slow. These are "photo opportunity" pilots and
scale-up expected - such as Nigeria ethanol - remains to be seen.

2. Of the rest five - LPG in Cameroon, Ecuador, Ghana, Indonesia and Peru
plus electric induction in Ecuador - three definitely qualify as
"scale-up", one (Cameroon) is too young and one (Ghana) is apparently
abortive - if the small one-time survey is any guide.

3, This is by no means "Around the World", a simple deceit that any data
check would have alerted a high school sophomore. I would include India,
China, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, Philippines (and Japan, Korea, US; why not?).
And if "healthy air" was an objective, why not identify the hot spots of
"dirty air" over the last 20 years and study the contribution of "clean
fuels" across the board (including CNG and LPG for transport in India, and
gas/electric cooking outside the households?)

Those of us in gas and electricity business have known for a hundred years
that cooking with gas and electricity is popular and contributes to
improved air quality (among other things). We just didn't cook up the
numbers on avoided DALYs. (There is still no quantification of avoided
premature deaths and disability due to "clean fuels", at home or elsewhere.
IHME and WHO should run their models retrospectively. They won't have the
data on fuel quantities and qualities, emission rates, contribution to
concentrations, total concentrations or exposures or disease incidence, but
that shouldn't be a deterrent; they don't have such data for the last 28
years and merrily go killing by assumptions.)

We also know people "stack". Stacking is a virtue, Kirk Smith's "Mind the
Gap" (with Jennifer Peel), notwithstanding.

In fact, the entire rationale for this and other such papers, including the
WHO Guidelines for HFC (based on non-existent regulations for indoor air
quality in developing countries), is cited by the authors as follows:

"The evidence underlying these recommendations identified two key issues
for policy on cleaner household energy:
• *The relationship *between exposure to fine particulate matter smaller
than 2.5 μm (PM2.5) and health risks for most health outcomes linked to HAP
exposure* is non-linear*, such that exposure levels need to be reduced to
values close to the actual guideline (10 μg/m3) to avert the majority of
the adverse health impacts.
• While improved solid fuel stoves in everyday use, especially those with
flues/chimneys, were found to result in substantial reductions of around
40–50% on average in kitchen PM2.5, *the resulting levels were still well
above the WHO guideline*. This finding implies that substantive health
benefits would not be achieved with currently available improved biomass
stoves, and that sustained communitywide use of clean fuels such as LPG,
biogas, ethanol, and electricity is required."

There is ZERO evidence for these claims. The first relies on extrapolating
dosage-disease graph from other sources of pollution and other types of
pollution (composition of pollutants) and other cohorts to household
cooking with "solid fuels". Not only are the assumptions - of equitoxicity,
uniformity of cohorts across lands and over decades - plain baseless, as
Kirk Smith acknowldged in 1999 (though not about equitoxicity, which canard
was invented by EPA after 2005), there is simply no data on HAP emissions
and contribution to exposures.

As for the second, I would like to know how many of some 600 million
households using solid fuels have been surveyed for indoor air
concentrations, pollutant composition, and disease incidence, for what
cohorts, how long, especially for "improved solid fuel stoves".

The claim "substantial reductions of around 40-50% on average in kitchen
PM2.5" for these "improved solid fuel stoves" is also likely based on
Berkeley-type box modeling based on emission rates, not actual field data
before and after, at least not for any meaningful sample size and duration
to derive any conclusion about using the IERs proposed in Burnett et al.
2014).

In sum, this is another propaganda for the intellectually invalids by those
crippled by ideology. Their listing of "findings" - from "Government is key
in setting the enabling environment" to "there is a set of user and
community needs and perceptions" is preliminary introduction of textbook
variety for the last 40 years. Their "key questions" are similar old hat.
Non-practitioners should do better to inform debate than simply parrot.
Peers should offer greater promise than beers - ferment and froth.

It is propaganda like this - with a hurriedly assembled WHO document, with
the connivance of EPA and DfID (two million pounds directly) - that is a
barrier to serious progress in making better use of biomass or other solid
fuels locally available at low cost.

Nikhil

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

On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 11:16 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> By Ashlinn K. Quinn, Nigel Bruce, Elisa Puzzolo, Katherine Dickinson,
> Rachel Sturke, Darby W. Jack,
> Sumi Mehta, Anita Shankar, Kenneth Sherr, Joshua P. Rosenthal
>
> Approximately 3 billion people, most of whom live in Asia, Africa, and the
> Americas, rely on solid fuels (i.e. wood, crop wastes, dung, charcoal) and
> kerosene for their cooking needs. Exposure to household air pollution from
> burning these fuels is estimated to account for approximately 3 million
> premature deaths a year. Cleaner fuels - such as liquefied petroleum gas,
> biogas, electricity, and certain compressed biomass fuels - have the
> potential to alleviate much of this significant health burden. A wide
> variety of clean cooking intervention programs are being implemented around
> the world, but very few of these efforts have been analyzed to enable
> global learning. The Clean Cooking Implementation Science Network (ISN),
> supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and partners,
> identified the need to augment the publicly available literature concerning
> what has worked well and in what context. The ISN has supported the
> development of a systematic set of case studies, contained in this Special
> Issue, examining clean cooking program rollouts in a variety of low- and
> middle-income settings around the world. We used the RE-AIM (reach,
> effectiveness, adaptation, implementation, maintenance) framework to
> coordinate and evaluate the case studies. This paper describes the clean
> cooking case studies project, introduces the individual studies contained
> herein, and proposes a general conceptual model to support future planning
> and evaluation of household energy programs.
>
> http://ccacoalition.org/en/file/4698/download?token=tmHN6M3d
>
>
>
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