[Stoves] Raising $4 billion

Wed Nov 6 12:15:55 CST 2019

Crispin:

1. Please tell us more about this $4 billion extravaganza. Project
Syndicate, a high-powered webzine whose pieces sometimes appear in
influential magazines has this piece by Kandeh Yumkella. I have never met
or heard him, but he has been in the UN Energy babbling space for close to
15 years since I first heard of him. " He is currently a member of Sierra
Leone’s Parliament and the Pan-African Parliament." according to this
piece.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/clean-cooking-solutions-household-air-pollution-africa-by-kandeh-k-yumkella-2019-11

In this piece, Mr Yumkella is singing paeans to Indian strongman and a
heady, dangerous warmonger Narendra Modi. Following the footsteps of Kirk
Smith's sycophancy., and goes loonie - "clean-cooking solutions – using,
say, electricity derived from renewable energy."

That is plain hysteria. Not only can you label electrons from the primary
fuel source, the relative costs of generation and distribution from
designated "renewable energy" can far outweigh those of blended supplies
from the grid, and all grids are context-specific, damn the UN blather.

Be that as it may, I think the $4 billion a year estimate comes from an
SE4All report last year and carries no weight. Moving even $40 million or
just $400,000 of one government's money to another government takes
diligence and effort that is far beyond the comprehension of academics and
UN pretenders. These kinds of pronouncements are misleading at best and
incitement to more belly aching, irrelevant academic research (like in the
epidemiology experiments), and license to WHO which has no jurisdiction in
energy or environmental policy and should be pushed off the table. (As also
EPA, which has no legal basis for cookstove protocols and standards in the
US or anywhere in the world. Just another bureaucrat-contractor conspiracy
of virtue signalling.)

2.  Now about the statement -  " the number of people not having access to
clean cooking is growing - we are losing ground. "?

What difference does it make, and to whom? Another vacuous assertion of no
relevance. Still,

a. I don't think you mean "we are losing ground" if the access (whatever
that means) to clean cooking (who defines?) is GROWING.

b. So what if that number is NOT growing if - as I have seen in many
countries just wandering in the streets (and even examining the survey and
census records) -  users are "stacking" more, even as they respond in
surveys that the "principal" cooking fuel is "biomass" or "woody fuels" or
"dung", "crop wastes", whatever.

These numbers were cooked up by Kirk Smith/Sumi Mehta, UNDP, some climate
researchers (in emission inventories for biomass). Mostly from disparate
surveys with the question "principal cooking fuel" in households. Ignoring
the fact that food and cooking practices have been changing, non-household
cooking energy use has exploded (difficult to pull together estimates but
academics only see what they prefer to see).

And there is ZERO national time-series information anywhere in the world on
the quantities and qualities of biomass fuels, emission factors, portion
attributable of concentrations of specific pollutants.

In other words, "No one knows".  Look at this paper,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590162119300437, which
I saw months ago and have some commentary on separately.

Basically, "No one knows" is the paradigm of all large numbers cooked up by
academics who know zilch about real fuel use practices and health of real
people, just manufacture lies using cite-o-logy and perpetuate accordingly.
They are not dishonest, you just have to read their papers in the original
with all the assumptions and qualifiers.

Parroting of big numbers doesn't solve a problem. Too much hysteria has
been generated in academia and media about "three billion people", with "4
million premature deaths" per year. Now "4 billion dollars".

US (via NIH, CDC) and Gates Foundation have poured loads of money in
irrelevant research. Time to move from advocacy to investments. Oil
companies and electricity companies - and appliance manufacturers and home
builders, masons - know this business. What would it take to design a
cleaner, cheaper, biomass fuel system for the poor? Say, with an aim to
deliver bulk charcoal at $10 per 25 kg sack, $10 for a truck load of good
quality wood from sustainable forestry, and modern cooking and heating
stoves with a delivered useful energy cost of 1-2 USc/MJ?

Are those economically feasible targets for the biomass enterprise we are
all so enamored of?

Nikhil

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

On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 4:07 AM Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> Dear friends
>
> This is the session on raising $4 bn for the clean cooking sector.
>
> Dr Yabei Zhang, from ESMAP, third from the left, pointed out that the
> number of people not having access to clean cooking is growing - we are
> losing ground.
>
> There is a clear indicator that households with a per capita income above
> $800 move to a clean cooking system. That is important to note.
>
> One role for financiers is paying for the marketing of what works.
>
> Regards
> Crispin
> for more Biomass Cooking Stoves,  News and Information see our web site:
> http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
>
>
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