[Stoves] Raising $4 billion

[Sujoy Chaudhury]

Dear Nikhil

Would you like to pilot your biomass entrepreneur model ? Could we?
Could put to rest so many of the things you have been saying all along.

Regards
Sujoy

On Sat, Nov 9, 2019 at 12:07 AM Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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