[Stoves] Off-topic: "Beyond Fire" - electric cooking beyond established grids

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

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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