[Stoves] ESPs for stove solidfuel PM2.5?

Sat Nov 24 13:46:51 CST 2018

Andrew:

You say "targets are needed". What targets and who needs them where? Why
should I concede that what WHO - and the cabal of "implementation
scientists" - WANT for everybody everywhere is indeed what is needed by
poor peoples and their governments?

The WHO 25µg/m3 guideline
<http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/69477/WHO_SDE_PHE_OEH_06.02_eng.pdf>
for PM2.5 is for 24-hour mean, with 10µg/m3 as the annual mean. For our
purposes, let me only note that

(a) this value need not be in every spot for everybody; the definition of
location, measurement protocol, and averaging methods matter;

(b) there is zilch evidence that the annual mean is reported in even 1,000
representative households or a representative neighborhood, city, district,
leave alone separately from cooking fuels and other sources (Kirk Smith has
no skeletons in his closet);

(c) the assumptions of equitoxicity, "no safe threshold", and uniform
cohorts across the world and over time, are simply untenable; (as also the
assumptions and derived form of the Integrated Exposure Response, which
came roughly a decade after the guideline); and,

(d) PM2.5 is an indicator of pollution because of its co-emission with
other pollutants such as NOx. (How much NOx from cookstoves, Crispin?)

There is no basis to drag WHO into cooking and heating stove business.
There is no there there. We are here to serve people, not pundits.

WHO "guidelines" are of zero value for air quality management (AQM). It has
"interim targets" for annual average and daily maxima, but again of no
consequence. It has SDG targets for energy and health which are in complete
contravention of our work on cleaner combustion of solid fuels because it
has bought into Berkeley/EPA/CCA lie that solid fuels are by definition
unhealthy.

Now that GACC is dead, the time has come to kill the ISO TC-285 circus and
rubbish the WHO/Berkeley gangsterism. (I hate to personalize the
distasteful propaganda in Kirk Smith, who I agree with in many respects,
just that he has to be held responsible for his intellectual air pollution.)

Let's see if people on this list can take control of the cookstoves debate,
even if they cannot produce usable, marketable cookstoves that are
contextually designed and promoted.

Who should give a hoo(t) about WHO?

Let's not be distracted by the red herrings. WHO air quality guidelines
(AQG) for PM2.5 and PM10 are purely adventurism of self-professed pundits.
WHO has neither the jurisdiction nor the competence in air quality
management (AQM) and of course no money to finance AQM development. It has
become the bag carrier for UN Foundation, Gates Foundation, and USEPA
(which has probably ended this last September, at least as far as
cookstoves and ISO TC-285 chatterbox are concerned)

We here should forget about WHO or, if we have the druthers, improve our
work and challenge the WHO directorate of social and environmental health
if we can't ignore them. The elements of challenge, apart from the case I
laid out above - there is no there there, just vacuous, incompetent babble
outside WHO's mandate - are simple:

1. The  are not "standards". (AQS) Even leaving aside the issue of
compliance and enforcement, standard-setting is an art with interplaying
colors of science, law, economics, and capacity, all contextually
determined. To pretend otherwise means a contempt of half a century of
regulatory battles in the rich, and better-informed, world.

2. WHO has borrowed these AQS from USEPA and such other entities, who in
turn use the AQS, with air transport modeling studies, to develop fuel bans
or source emission standards, depending on location and associated
demographics, meteorology, and technology status. Again, this has the same
colors with different contextual pictures. But unlike them, WHO has no
authority - nor the competence - to define fuel bans or emission standards.
What it did in its 2014 report Household Fuel Combustion Guidelines - Solid
Fuels (HFCG) is a ridiculous overreach, on the strength of ludicrous
"literature reviews" on invalid or incomparable cohorts, that consultants
like Kirk Smith and Sumi Mehta churned out. The literature reviews and the
GBD "relative risk" computations, combined with contemptible "room
modeling" by BAMG got you the TC 285 emission targets, on the one hand, and
gave license to Kirk Smith to pronounce "not truly health protective" and
"no stacking".

All this has been a waste of tie. The only proper means of moving the
technology frontier is to develop low-emission rate stoves that make a
significant measurable contribution to improving the quality of air
breathed by specific populations.

Yes, I am in favor of fuel bans if such technologies are not available. But
not only are cleaner combustion technologies available, there are means of
venting, filtering, extracting that can be adapted to different structures
and neighborhoods.

Fuel bans or subsidies I am reasonably equipped to evaluate. I have even
had some effective contribution there. What we next need is to challenge
WHO and CCA to come up with (i) the evidence of daily and annual exposures
to solid fuel cookstove pollutants and corresponding disease incidence,
(ii) establish causality and hence avoidability, and (iii) air quality
modeling for daily, monthly, seasonal variations according to geographies,
fuels, cohorts, that can inform air quality management plans. (If they
continue to kill people by GBD assumptions, I demand lifelong exposure data
for roughly 3 billion people from 1986 to 2026.)

Time to turn the heat on. So those who can't cook get out of the kitchen
and stop feasting at the meager foods of the unfortunate.

Any takers?

Nikhil

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

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 6:07 AM Andrew Heggie <aj.heggie at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 at 03:46, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
> <crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
> >
>
> > I was looking at the Kyrgyz Republic indoor air quality measurements
> from Fresh Air, Netherlands. It is rare to find a home that is below 25
> µg/m3 even after installing a good stove.
>
> ...but is 25µg/m3 the target we should be aiming for, I realise this is
> the level the World Health Organisation say but how practicable is it given
> your next paragraph?
> >
> > Boots on the floor, smoking and cooking provide almost 100% of the IAP
> once the stove is taken care of.
>
> This is very much what I see at home, around 5µg/m3 quiescent state but
> when I walk into the room I notice a temporary rise to over 10µg/m3, some
> of this may possibly be from particulates released into the local
> atmosphere by *my* chimney as I heat with wood, as well as background
> particulates and dust from my working.
> >
> > As for the use of electrostatic precipitators and catalytic converters,
> they have both been promoted recently in Ulaanbaatar at a cost equal to or
> above the cost of providing a highly advanced new stove. In other words
> they are willing to spend more money to clean up emissions instead of
> preventing them in the first place.
>
> Yes I cannot see this being a sensible use of the money, nor
> fitting filters like a diesel car has to have now in UK (they have a
> back pressure which could not be overcome with natural draught).
> >
> > Run properly the PM output is about 0.006 g/kg burned. Run badly it is
> about 4 or 5 times that: 0.030 g/kg. It is not worth spending hundreds of $
> per installation to reduce that further.
>
> This will be coal burning then?
> >
> > I see one of the stoves at the competition in DC reached 0.42 with
> wood.  That’s pretty good.
>
> So is it a sensible target, 0.42g/kg of fuel burned? If we assume 150%
> excess air (or more as long as it's known) we can relate that to a
> particulate concentration in µg/m3 of the stack emissions.
>
> ...and yes Nikhil I realise I am being deterministic where you consider it
> is meaningless but I still feel targets are needed.
>
> Andrew
>
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