There is a new white-paper out from The GWPF that illustrates the damage being done to people in poorer countries by environmentalists’ obsession with decarbonization in their imaginary quest to stave off global warming. As Dr. John Christy once said:
The report, by eminent epidemiologist Mikko Paunio, says that international bodies and NGOs are trying to prevent poor countries from expanding their use of conventional fuels, have abandoned the so-called “energy ladder” — the gradual shift to cleaner types of fuel that underpinned the clean up of air quality in industrialised nations.
As Dr Paunio explains, this will have devastating consequences:
“Indoor air pollution from domestic fires kills millions every year. But instead of helping poor people to climb the energy ladder and clean the air in their communities, the poorest people are being given gimmicks like cookstoves, which make little difference to air quality, and solar panels, which are little more than a joke.”
What is worse, the greens inside and outside the development community are blaming air pollution on power stations, industry and cars, as a way to prevent any shift to industrial power production. As Dr Paunio makes clear, most air pollution in poor countries is in fact caused by burning low-quality biofuels and coal in domestic stoves:
“Trying to blame power stations for indoor air pollution might make greens feel they are saving the planet, but the reality is that they are allowing millions of deaths from air pollution to continue. The body count is going to rival that of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.”
Executive summary
Domestic combustion of solid (bio)fuels is by far the number one global pollution problem. 4.3 million deaths annually are directly attributable to indoor air pollution (IAP) according to the World Health Organization. Domestic combustion of solid biofuels kills almost six million people per year when its effects on ambient air quality are also taken into consideration.
The so called ‘energy ladder’ was introduced as away of understanding how deaths from IAP might be prevented. The energy ladder seeks to reproduce the experience of rich countries, where households moved away from biofuels and were increasingly connected to electric grids or district heating systems, solving the IAP problem for good.
However, ever-growing resistance from the environmental movement has removed this beneficial approach from the development agenda. Environmentalists fear that by taking steps upwards on the energy ladder, from dirty solid fuels such as cow dung or crop residues, and towards use of electricity, poor countries would become wealthier and so increase their energy use and their carbon intensity. They have managed to persuade all important multilateral development bodies and the WHO to drop the energy ladder entirely. Instead, they are now coercing the poorest countries to adopt utopian energy policies based on renewables. The result is that combatting IAP in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, is becoming impossible.
Aggressive decarbonization is now high on the political agenda. Contrary to the widely disseminated claims of important global actors, this will not solve the problem of IAP.Moreover, it will hamper the expansion of electric grids, which is a critical prerequisite for delivering adequate water supplies, without which it will be impossible to reproduce the public health miracle experienced in the rich countries.
These ‘ambitious’ global climate mitigation policies leave environmental health problems amongst the poor unaddressed and will result in the loss of over 200 million lives by 2050. They are also unlikely – even in theory – to prevent the 250,000 annual deaths that the WHO speculates will be attributable to climate change between 2030 and 2050: high-quality IPCC-linked research has recently shown that solid biomass combustion actually increases CO2 emissions, at least over the next 100 years, compared to fossil fuels.
Full paper (pdf): Kicking Away The Energy Ladder: How environmentalism destroys hope for the poorest
I’ve long had interest in these basic issues of health and quality of life being with indoor air pollution. But in this case the writing is missing basic information and make questionable statements.
I’ve got the cited report: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/05/Paunio-EnergyLadder.pdf
1. The first two quotes in the blog post are not in cited paper by Paunio!
2. In reference to the first quote — “gimmicks like cookstoves” — do these gimmick stoves vent smoke right back into the room or do they include exhaust flues to vent smoke and gas outside??
Surely nearly every reader has had some experience with a well designed Franklin style stove vs. one with a blocked or closed vent can appreciate the difference. The quote manages to confuse and bury the most arresting point.
3. The cited paper — “Kicking Away the Energy Ladder” does not define what indoor air pollution (IAP) is. Nor does it explain the relationship, if any, with ambient air pollution.
(A cookstove with an effective vent to the outdoors presumably reduces IAP but not ambient air pollution?)
4. The paper states:
“However, it has been agonizingly difficult – for many reasons and despite several large scale programs over the years – to bring about pollution-free indoor environments using
improved cookstoves. No large-scale cookstove program to date has achieved reductions in IAP or provided any health benefits.”
That surprising and counter intuitive result deserves a few words of explanation and context. It’s a matter of persuasive communication.
In part, I believe it is an example of why field trials are necessary to discover the subtle design issues that can make or break a new technology and successful adoption.
Unfortunately, one could some away with the impression that cookstoves are no better than open fires without a chimney or vent. Which I do not believe is the case.
5. The section on the “energy ladder” is confusing and contradictory.
I’m guessing that the type of fuel (electricity being at the top of the ladder) is the most important element.
But where does “stoves with heat storage” come into the picture?
Or structures with chimneys?
Is the Chinese “kang” a stove or a type of structure? Does the kang stove have a chimney or vent?
6. “When we bear in mind that residential heating and cooking with solid (bio)fuels remains
the root cause of almost all pollution exposure – both indoor and ambient”
I think it’s more accurate to describe it as “a root cause” rather than “the root cause”.
The implication I take away is that it’s impossible to reduce IAP /pollution exposure with well designed stove systems. That is contrary to the facts as I understand them. Better designed stoves reduce the amount of fuel burned, produce cleaner exhaust, and exhaust it outside. Thereby IAP is reduced in three ways and ambient pollution in two.
” – the health co-benefts of ever more stringent climate mitigation are revealed as wishful thinking; there is no way to reduce pollution from cooking except to switch to liquefed petroleum gas or
electricity.”
This makes the error of speaking categorically when the impact is relative.
To bad, because once the miscommunication — the communication pollution is reduced — there is a environmentally and ethically import message to convey.
Paunio:
““When we bear in mind that residential heating and cooking with solid (bio)fuels remains
the root cause of almost all pollution exposure – both indoor and ambient”
This completely ignores the ambient pollution from the burning of fossil fuels! Think of millions of Chinese walking around with masks on. I think it’s Mumbai where people are allowed to drive their cars only every second day, the pollution is so bad.
So Paunio is saying, because cook stoves are polluting, people should build more sources of pollution in hopes people don’t use stoves anymore. Makes sense, right?
Paunio:
“the gradual shift to cleaner types of fuel that underpinned the clean up of air quality in industrialised nations.” Yeah, this depends on regulation, just what the right loves to fight!
“What is worse, the greens inside and outside the development community are blaming air pollution on >>>power stations, industry and cars,<<>>cleaner transport, energy-efficient housing, power generation, industry and better municipal waste management<<< can effectively reduce key sources of ambient air pollution."
“Executive summary
“Domestic combustion of solid (bio)fuels is by far the number one global pollution problem. 4.3 million deaths annually are directly attributable to indoor air pollution (IAP) according to the World Health Organization. ”
The WHO makes no such assertion. Let me parse this statement:
Domestic combustion of fuels refers to use in the household, not what burns outside, so let’s be clear that air pollution is not all from home use of energy,
Solid fuels has never, in any paper I have seen (and it is part of my job) referred to “solid (bio)fuels”. This is the first time I have seen such a prefix on solid fuels. The WHO has been careful to try to demonise all solid fuels on the basis that they are inherently “smoky and polluting”, a position advocated for years by one Prof Kirk Smith of UC Berkeley. He is not alone in that of course, but he is one of the most prolific authors of articles attempting to sell the concept.
Domestic combustion of solid fuels is not nearly the “number one global pollution problem.” That is just hype attached to hope.
“4.3 million deaths” is a misquote – please see the original: it is 4.3 million premature deaths. There is a world of difference between a premature death (died before the age of 86, the global expectancy for a perfect, unpolluted life) and a death caused by something. The word “attributed” is correct in this instance: attribution of contributions to a premature death are made by a committee of experts who assign the shortening of lives from 86 into 51 bins of causes. There is no medical proof for this, it is done by ‘attribution’, meaning they assign a portion of a shortened set of lives (usually an entire national population of the dead) to various contributing causes based on the science available at the time. This list is revised annually as new information comes to light.
“Indoor air pollution” is one component of all air pollution. No one can attribute indoor air pollution separately from other air pollution because the statistics do not exist to be able to do so. In consequence, they portion attributed to IAP is estimated based on a number of guesses and spotty measurement. They are using a misquote to claim that premature deaths were cause by combusting solid fuels indoors, hoping that the public and even experts are unaware of how the number was determined, and that there is no ‘there’ there. Nothing. It is entirely made up from what little inputs one can assemble.
Far more important that the misrepresentation of what is happening in the world of fake and imaginary statistics is who is behind this. I received a message this morning from the SEforAll conference in Lisbon
https://www.seforall.org/content/sustainable-energy-all-forum-may-2018-lisbon
this past week at which the WHO has been trying to sell the idea that some fuels (all solid ones of course) are evil and some (gas and liquids but not kerosene) are ‘good and clean’. They are trying to claim that some fuels are inherently clean without testing the appliance’s ability to burn it – something no doubt strongly endorsed by Volkswagen management.
Here is a comment which I must anonymise because of the vindictive predilections of the promoters of this nonsense:
+++++
“You are exactly right on their goal that “We have to promote subsidised LPG and electricity in order to keep people safe; we can tolerate some wood stoves temporarily”.
“Such promotion is just getting stronger and louder with global LPG partnership and world LPG association’s resources and lobby behind.”
+++++
The WHO has apparently been “state-captured” by the LP Gas association, otherwise known as the fossil fuel industry, and is being used to make their product a subsidised requirement (no other way to get it to the poor save subsidy, a-la-Indonesia and India). Even Kenya, impoverished as its people are, is giving LP Gas a pass on import taxes.
They claim that kerosene, which runs fine in aircraft, is inherently polluting, so is to be regarded as “a dirty fuel”. Coal is anathema, though for the first time, following the ICCI/CCAC Conference in Warsaw last year, the Lisbon meeting grudgingly admits that some coals can be burned very cleanly and might be tolerated after individual testing. That is (a) a sea change and (b) a direct result of cutting edge work in Asia and Africa. I was in Potchefstroom last month to demonstrate how to build domestic coal stoves with 99.97% combustion efficiency of bituminous and sub-bituminous coals. Match that, Volkswagen.
Note: There is an oft-cited WHO paper talking about 4.3m premature deaths (2012) and a well-hidden one that incorrectly uses the term “deaths” (2013) which stands uncorrected. If anyone shows you the 2013 citation, be sure to point out it is a mis-citation of the 2012 document. In the effort by the LP Gas Association to associate all solid fuels and kerosene (their main competitor) with the death of millions, it is becoming more common to cite the mis-cite rather than the original article.
Finally: The worst pollutant on the plant at the moment causing the most disease, disability and general ill-health is probably sugar or high fructose corn syrup. I willingly take my daily dose with coffee.
Another example is “fair trade coffee” and other goods. To be in the fair trade network, you cannot mechanize, expand, or modernize your business. They want the african farmers to suit their tastes, not make the most money.
Tried the “fair trade” coffee and other items, yuck, back to the regular stuff.
We can continue to endlessly complain, explain, comment and whine about all the perversities of the “Green” movement with no significant effect, or we can recognize that a way to counteract and eventually end them is by concentrating all efforts on pointing out the lack of any definitive scientific proof that co2 causes warming, i.e., eliminate the single key underpinning of all their claims.