[Stoves] Air pollution kills

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at outlook.com
Thu May 3 13:42:32 CDT 2018


Dear Paul

So…right here in the introduction we see the conflation of premature deaths and causes of death:

“…even in high-income European cities, air pollution is knocking 2–24 months off people’s lives.”

So is air pollution is a cause of death or not? “Killing people” means causing their deaths, right?

The advantage to the shriekers of such doom is they can easily take legitimate scientific studies about contributors to the shortening of lives and turn them into catastrophic mass-murdering targets of attention, ire and of course don’t forget, finance.

So I bothered to interview  couple of people about why this style of alarm continues when it is do obviously contrived. Several interesting things emerged. One is that stove programmes have difficulty getting funded and we need a highly visible claim to money based on something scary, present, and clear. The claims has to be that if given the money, the bogeyman can be made to run away.

Another is that the current mania about “air pollution kills x-million people per year” is based on a number of things said by the WHO, which are based on other claims emerging from a very small group of people, even one or two, that for all I can see, are rooted in ideology preceding the supporting ‘science’.

We have already discussed the fact that the PM2.5 “equitoxicity” ruling of the EPA’s “…because we don’t know they are not” is about as shabby as it gets when it comes to medical science. The claims below are of course based on that ruling. So it transpires that one of the leaders in this death-by-air movement was a PhD student of alarmist John Holdren, who was in turn a PhD student of that arch-alarmist John Ehrlich – author of the most catastrophic and failed book of predictions in the modern era: “The Population Bomb”. No act is too horrific to commit if the cause of noble enough.

On reflection, modern catastrophists have nothing on the granddaddy of environmental eschatology:

“The 1968 doomsday bestseller <https://www.amazon.com/Population-Bomb-Paul-R-Ehrlich/dp/1568495870> generated hysteria over the future of the world and the Earth’s waning ability to sustain human life, as Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich offered a series of alarming predictions that turned out to be spectacularly wrong, creating the enduring myth of unsustainable population growth.

“Ehrlich prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will not exist in the year 2000.”

“In conclusion, Ehrlich warned that ‘sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,’ meaning ‘an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.’”

From The ‘Population Bomb’ (that bombed) Turns 50 this year<https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/05/02/the-population-bomb-that-bombed-turns-50/>.

Phew! It seems that 1983 passed without much fanfare about the passing of humanity. We have survived three times longer than the doom-saying predictions of Mr We-are-all-going-to-die!”

What are we going to do about this? The first thing to overthrow is the equitoxicity ruling. We cannot have a sensible conversation about air pollution until we segregate what is really harmful from what is harmful from what is benign from what may be beneficial.

For a start, it would helpful if we could differentiate between fly-ash and PM2.5 from incomplete combustion. Fly-ash is not very toxic while condensed, evaporated volatiles from stoves can have strong medical effects. That way we can at least start to talk about removing specific contributors to specific consequences.

The ‘major players’ in the stove circus are apparently not willing to tackle this issue head on. So, where do we the practitioners begin?

Regards
Crispin




From: Stoves <stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org> On Behalf Of Paul Anderson
Sent: 2-May-18 20:37
To: Stoves and biofuels network <Stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Cc: Nikhil Desai <ndesai at alum.mit.edu>
Subject: [Stoves] Air pollution kills

Stovers,

I just thought you might find this interesting. '

This came from  the issue on Wednesday 2 May 2018 of:


[Nature Briefing]<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnature.us17.list-manage.com%2Ftrack%2Fclick%3Fu%3D2c6057c528fdc6f73fa196d9d%26id%3Dd2eab8d5f6%26e%3D562108ab5a&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4acd3bdd986f4c43486508d5b0f5d6f9%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636609492275501130&sdata=T%2BaJt0g5mtUTDQSPepKt%2F6DmLVkeasyU4if%2FCB%2BzE3I%3D&reserved=0>



Hello Nature readers,


Air pollution kills 7 million people a year<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnature.us17.list-manage.com%2Ftrack%2Fclick%3Fu%3D2c6057c528fdc6f73fa196d9d%26id%3Dfed70f971c%26e%3D562108ab5a&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4acd3bdd986f4c43486508d5b0f5d6f9%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636609492275501130&sdata=P7HK9DUjp%2BoJ4PGjzz17hyUY2a5I6uZ9VRx4T2CNYXU%3D&reserved=0>

About 90% of the world’s population is exposed to dangerously high levels of air pollution<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnature.us17.list-manage.com%2Ftrack%2Fclick%3Fu%3D2c6057c528fdc6f73fa196d9d%26id%3De7570b0287%26e%3D562108ab5a&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4acd3bdd986f4c43486508d5b0f5d6f9%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636609492275501130&sdata=%2Fvlra5I50hGSir%2Bat%2BgCdqNJAt8nCRm72lAAmFS4NVA%3D&reserved=0>, says the World Health Organization. Toxic air leads to the early death of an estimated 7 million people every year, including an estimated 3.8 million deaths from indoor cooking with polluting fuels. More than 90% of air pollution-related deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, but even in high-income European cities, air pollution is knocking 2–24 months off people’s lives.
The Times<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnature.us17.list-manage.com%2Ftrack%2Fclick%3Fu%3D2c6057c528fdc6f73fa196d9d%26id%3D4f7c6ff0a2%26e%3D562108ab5a&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4acd3bdd986f4c43486508d5b0f5d6f9%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636609492275501130&sdata=Ax7MKSBe0AG5ySCZcMj35saE7qV9KQghYjjMjy5ZW1s%3D&reserved=0> | 4 min read
40% of the world population cook with solid fuels.   So 60% do not.   Of that 60%, 50%  (50% of 60% is  83%) ALSO are exposed by dangerously high levels of air pollution.

Basically, nobody is safe.

So why push for LPG for the poorest 40% when even that is not going to do much good for them????   Or is that mainly a promotion effort by LPG business?

So it seems like there is no chance of pleasing the WHO.   7 million deaths per year from air pollution.

************

I will keep pushing for cleaner cookstoves, espacially the micro-gasifier TLUD type.


Paul




--

Doc  /  Dr TLUD  /  Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD

Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu<mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>

Skype:   paultlud    Phone: +1-309-452-7072

Website:  www.drtlud.com<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.drtlud.com&data=02%7C01%7C%7C4acd3bdd986f4c43486508d5b0f5d6f9%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636609492275501130&sdata=5KmFt%2BUFhMaQNITw%2F9xarw6Fepn9RFAaRsziBC1eJfE%3D&reserved=0>
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