[Stoves] Off-topic: "Beyond Fire" - electric cookingbeyondestablished grids

Sat Jun 1 15:31:22 CDT 2019

Your response is long, long, long.  I will address only the first line.

“It is not even the case that "health" is a variable.”

Is that what you got from my contribution?  The word variable is a tiny concern.  The fact that you focus on it makes me think that you want to take attention away from my real points.  The substance of my statement focuses attention on improved biomass stoves vs. electrical stoves vs. less improved biomass cooking techniques.  Please try again to provide a response to the substance of my contribution.  It is fine if you want to find some way of putting down my statements if you can, that is part of discussions, but please address the real issues I brought up.

Please keep your new response short and to the point.  And clear, also clear, not wandering around.  Long and wandering responses that lead attention away from the issue could possibly misdirect the list.  Perhaps using no more than 100 words could help you not to wander off topic.

Kirk H.

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Nikhil Desai
Sent: Saturday, June 1, 2019 11:55 AM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Off-topic: "Beyond Fire" - electric cookingbeyondestablished grids

Kirk H.: 

It is not even the case that "health" is a variable.

Health is "well-being", "absence of disease". There is no causal link established between cookstove emission rates and particular diseases. 

Let me explain: 

1. Cookstove emissions have multiple pollutants, but the emission rates, and their impact on ingestion, are measured in but a handful of studies for short periods of time for small samples. 
2. Even long-term studies - such as the much-touted Guatemala study of Kirk Smith & Co. - suffer from context specificity - cool or cold highlands with a particular type of fuel and cooking pattern - and confounding factors - age and health conditions, access to and use of medical care, mobility, non-stove emissions from cooking (foods themselves!), and non-cooking sources of the same or different pollutants. 
3. The GBD study is NOT based on any actual data on pollutant ingestion - quantities, duration - or even of disease incidence - frequency, duration, timing. 

So, what can be said about the likely impact of stoves with a particular PM2.5 emission rate on the well-being of any particular cohort over its lifetime (since we are talking Years of Life Lost due to "premature death" and "disability"? 

Nothing. Not only are the attributions of population-wide morbidity silly exercises based on non-existent data, Kirk Smith cautions us that what is attributable is not necessarily avoidable. If nothing else, confounding confounds. And there are lots and lots of variables. 

I have said this earlier but perhaps not as concisely. Paul sent out a piece a couple of months ago where Kirk Smith and Co. made claims about mitigation of Household Air Pollution and achieving Indian ambient air standards. It is neither truthful nor meaningful to continue criticizing this persistent, chronic intellectual air pollution. 

Your instinct is quite correct - " The cook using a TLUD might like not having to stay close to the hot stove pushing fuel into it, but can step back while the meal is cooking and do other things like care for the baby, prepare the rest of the meal, sew clothing, etc.  The improved stove might be so nice to use that, once the cook is comfortable with how to use it, it will gradually take over more of the cooking load. "

I haven't had millions of dollars wasted by my friends on rural energy or household energy surveys - all of them one-time boondoggles with more emphasis on the design and vocabulary, and subsequent statistical analyses than on understanding the cook and the fuels, access and economics, complementary or competing uses of cooks' or other family members' time and energy. But I have had eyes. Since childhood and interviewing around the world, these days immigrants in the Washington area (most recently, Sudan, Ethiopia, Ghana), I have confirmed the basic validity of your argument - "if the cook takes it up, she will use it more."

"Cooking load" is the key concept here. I think this is the first time I have seen anybody mention it. I hope somebody will take a stab at defining and measuring "cooking load":. It will become obvious that these are contextual. 

Not worthy of PhDs except to dismantle the house of cards. 

I also agree with you on the second part - :" they are questionable in “beyond established grids” low income areas.  Perhaps there isn’t enough money in some of these areas to entice electrical and fossil fuel companies to expand there (?).  Improved biomass stoves might be the best choice here, especially improved stoves that can use brush, ag waste, and farmed fuels instead of trees."

Except that I would turn the question around - Where is induction cooking NOT questionable? Back 10-15 years ago, when I was working on micro-grids based on small hydro, biomass gasification, wind/pv/diesel hybrid (yes,  in 1996, for Mexican highlands, under a US utility's carbon offset project), a question did come up if cooking load that was "off-peak". There was no such commercially available option, at least not one that can be serviced in the rural areas. 

However, the rural geography and connectivity have changed.  More girls are in schools and in some employment after school. Electricity at night changes things. If a hot pot made tea or coffee, an induction stove was used for keeping things warm while the main cooking was done in a better ventilated area of a new home anyway, and if more cooking was "outsourced", "stacking" of fuels and stoves changes the distribution of, ah, "cooking load" in the aggregate. 

I once won over a lifelong "stover" by taking the vocabulary of electric utility in "load management" and "backup", "storage". There is a history of 60 years now about how stacking changes the load distribution for all scarce resources - time first of all, energy (human), and primary biomass included. 

Nikhil 

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

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 9:31 PM Kirk H. <gkharris316 at comcast.net> wrote:
Good discussion.

I would add in that health is not the only variable.  The cook using a TLUD might like not having to stay close to the hot stove pushing fuel into it, but can step back while the meal is cooking and do other things like care for the baby, prepare the rest of the meal, sew clothing, etc.  The improved stove might be so nice to use that, once the cook is comfortable with how to use it, it will gradually take over more of the cooking load. 

I think that, as nice as electrical stoves are, they are questionable in “beyond established grids” low income areas.  Perhaps there isn’t enough money in some of these areas to entice electrical and fossil fuel companies to expand there (?).  Improved biomass stoves might be the best choice here, especially improved stoves that can use brush, ag waste, and farmed fuels instead of trees.

Kirk H.

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2019 5:40 AM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Off-topic: "Beyond Fire" - electric cooking beyondestablished grids

Dear Andrew

>I don't understand the objection to "stacking", is it just that  if less clean cooking appliances are used as well as the cleaner ones the improvement is simply not good enough?

The claim is that stoves can be “health protective”.  This is a highly suspect claim. It is obvious that stoves in combination with fuels can be “health damaging”.  Just because something causes, in a general population, assessible harm, doesn’t mean that replacing a particular stove+fuel with another confers some quantifiable measure of “health protection” on that individual.  Nikhil has been trying to communicate this point for a long time.  

If you were to know a great deal about everyone in the past whose health was harmed by stove emissions, and about the individual get the new system, you could project something, but a stove is not a pill. It is not a medical treatment.

Similarly, people who smoke cigarettes are affected differently. Getting someone to go from 20 per day to 5 does not “confer a quantifiable health benefit” on that person. I knew a 92 year old lady who smokes almost continuously.  When she died she dies “post-maturely” and it is possible, according to the logic of IHME, to attribute her exceptionally long life to smoking cigarettes. 

Stove stacking is being used to undermine the “general benefits” of reducing exposure to smoke. Having made the error of claiming specific benefits for an individual (about whom nothing is known) it is “logical” to claim that reducing the use of the stove from 100% to 50% means half the benefits are lost and the number of avoided disability life years (aDALYs) is reduced.  

The entire exercise is fictitious.  DALYs do not actually exist and neither do aDALYs. Generally speaking the proponents are confusing health policy with medicine. 

Regards
Crispin

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