9 ms·

Cheap, clean stoves were supposed to save millions of lives – what happened?

48 points by r721 11y ago

SixSigma 11y ago
"We know what's best for rural Indian poor" proclaims millionaire with her own catering. Still, at least India has a rocket going to Mars even if its children don't have toilets and clean water.
- panglott 11y ago
  Reminds me of RFK's 1968 trip to Appalachia while the Apollo program was underway.
- monochromatic 11y ago
  > "We know what's best for rural Indian poor" proclaims millionaire with her own catering. Of all the (many, many) things that are worth criticizing about Hillary, I'm not sure this is one of them.
- denzil_correa 11y ago
  > Still, at least India has a rocket going to Mars even if its children don't have toilets and clean water. Fallacy of Relative Privation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    Like Kim Il Jong eating while his people starve, I guess that's the same fallacy
    - nivla 11y ago
      That is not the same fallacy. That is one person who controls the nation sitting on an immense amount of wealth while his people starve. India doesn't have a huge wealth tucked under its bed that it refuses to redistribute to its citizens. Let me put this into perspective for you, even distributing 1 billion dollars to its citizens barely makes each person richer by only a dollar!
      - SixSigma 11y ago
        Thanks for the perspective, I feel so stupid. I'm sure spending $1bn on clean water and sewage in the some of the most populous cities on earth would be equally pointless.
- nivla 11y ago
  > Still, at least India has a rocket going to Mars even if its children don't have toilets and clean water. These arguments are the worst as it conveniently misses the mark of the real world conditions. Yes India did spent on the Mars mission (a whopping $74mil) and in turn it actually got contracts to do launches for other countries and private corporations. So all in all a positive return on Investment. You see you start with $X and you make $X*2 which would now serve your purpose better than it would have before. Well on the bright side atleast you dint say lets decommission the NASA until we solve the problem of homelessness in US.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Is your second sentence a sarcastic suggestion that they shouldn't be sending rockets to Mars and should instead put those resources towards helping rural Indian poor people? If so, what makes your ideas of what's best for them any better than this person's?
stevetrewick 11y ago
>Perhaps more research could apprehend what actually works No, not really. Since the obvious solution (i.e. the one that has worked everywhere in the world it's been tried) is affordable grid scale electricity - which at this point means fossil or nuclear - and the west is apparently hellbent on preventing the devolping world from having this, it's unlikely any future research will come up with anything of any actual utility.
- pjc50 11y ago
  The developing world cannot afford nuclear. The developed world can barely afford nuclear; see Hinkley Point C, on course to be the most expensive source of electricity in the UK. There isn't really a grand conspiracy to prevent the developing world having fossil fuels either. Developing world countries aren't not building power plants because of the Kyoto agreement, which barely binds them, they're not building them because of the usual mix of disorganisation, corruption and lack of access to capital.
  - FussyZeus 11y ago
    I bet the 418 million pissed away on these stupid stoves would go a long way there. Maybe instead of trying to give them bits of civilization in the wilderness, we ought to just bring them out of the fucking wilderness entirely and be done with it.
    - panglott 11y ago
      Maybe it would be a good idea to try building a working electrical grid that can deliver power to rural areas before trying your hand at a nuclear power plant?
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    Vietnam is building out nuclear at an incredibly fast rate. Hardly a wealthy nation. They'll get 100 years out of those reactors.
- eveningcoffee 11y ago
eveningcoffee 11y ago
I do not have time to read this bag of words but I searched for the word "chimney" and I did not find it. See, there is your problem and a big fat hint for a solution. Most countries in northern hemisphere solved this problem more than century ago and it amazes me how this solution is not even mentioned once.
- intopieces 11y ago
  Lack of research and cultural context is the reason the plans proposed in the article failed to begin with. You fell in a similar trap, it seems.
  - FussyZeus 11y ago
    What in the culture anywhere prevents installation of a chimney? And if it does how is the ONLY reasonable response "your culture sucks, build it anyway so you stop inhaling actual bull shit"?
- cc438 11y ago
  These populations aren't mentally incompetent, they use chimneys. The issue is that chimney's aren't 100% efficient and only remove the pollution from the home, not the surrounding environment. The pollution becomes pervasive when an entire city of 100,000+ people is cooking with biomass fuel. Your chimney's exhaust is just another person's air when it's as concentrated as you'd find in places like those described in the article.
  - clock_tower 11y ago
    Look at the woman in the article picture: she's not using a chimney, and she has to squat to cook. German women were cooking standing up (building fires on raised stone platforms), with chimneys to vent away smoke, in the 17th century. (See Fernand Braudel, _The Structures of Everyday Life_.) Draw your own conclusions: pathological loyalty to tradition or lack of imagination; or severe lack of capital and calories; or what?
aaron695 11y ago
Sounds to me like it is working, is what happened. > Although these cookstoves produce fewer emissions than open fires, burning biomass fuels in them still releases plenty of toxins For toxins that actually matter, that's smoke in layperson terms. So what if the benefits are only partially there. It still rocks. It makes me suspicions that the study where all the stovetops were no longer being used, was just picked as an example because it failed. And as to electricity and gas being better, that's nice, the doers can continue down the biomass efficiency road while this is still being discussed.
- benp84 11y ago
  That was my take-away too. They had an idea to fix a problem, it worked but not as well as hoped, so now they're learning and iterating. Sounds like any experimental project (or startup). They got 28 million stoves out with a budget of $10m/year (times 5 years?). Big deal if they haven't saved the world yet.
pakled_engineer 11y ago
A solsource solar cooker I gave to a friend's family in the Rajasthan desert still works as advertised a year later. These are desperate needed around refugee camps where locals clash with refugees looking for firewood.
bcg1 11y ago
Ethanol stoves are actually great for this problem... very low emissions, and fuel that is easy and safe to store and can be produced locally. In many parts of the world, there are abundant non-food sources of mash... kelp, mesquite seeds, cattails, etc... and community scale production is much more efficient than the bizarre government subsidized ethanol industry in the US that uses GE corn with that requires a lot of energy input and has a high energy cost for transportation to and from the centralized production facilities. I'm not sure how it is "undeveloped" countries but around here is quite illegal to make your own fuel in this way however... it is, after all, the "A" in BATF. It seems that without addressing such issues, the "clean" stoves will not be popular because locals would need to keep paying some "authority" (government or otherwise) for access to the fuel, and money is much more scarce than dung in many places.
- panglott 11y ago
  "the more complex stoves that run on electricity or burn liquid fuels typically cost more and require access to a steady and cheap supply of fuel, which often isn’t available in rural villages."
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    Are you claiming that rural villages will be unable to produce their own ethanol? In what parts of the world do you see that being a problem?
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > I'm not sure how it is "undeveloped" countries but around here is quite illegal to make your own fuel in this way however... Not sure what you mean by "in this way", but it is quite legal to make ethanol fuel for your own use in the US.
  - bcg1 11y ago
    You have to get a license from the BATF to do so, and you are limited to 10,000 gallons per year (which is plenty). To get the license you have to give them permission to enter your property without a warrant to inspect whenever they like, and you have to keep meticulous records to account for every gallon produced. By "in this way" I meant a means through which normal people can make their own fuel with a low barrier to entry and little or no risk of fines and/or jail.
kirk21 11y ago
Solar panels + batteries will have an enormous impact in a lot of countries. Once ppl buy a stove it is 'free' to use vs having to buy fuel every time (like pellets or ethanol). Will take 10-15 years but it is coming. Combine this with satellite internet and the living standard will radically increase.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  Cooking use very much energy compared to led lamps or even tvs.
zeveb 11y ago
> “As yet, no biomass stove in the world is clean enough to be truly health protective in household use,” says Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California at Berkeley and the leading health researcher on cookstoves. My understanding is that rocket stoves[1] are extremely efficient and non-polluting. Is that incorrect, or are rocket stoves not profitable for the concerns promoting this sort of effort? > “With their system of government, they can kind of dictate what happens,” notes Jim Jetter, a senior research engineer who tests cookstoves for the EPA. Well, yes, it helps if one can sentence holdouts to the laogai. > much like some American cooks like the flavor of meat grilled over charcoal. Only some? I'm pretty sure that everyone prefers the flavour of food cooked over good lump charcoal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove
clock_tower 11y ago
While we're at it, check out http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/06/thermal-efficiency-cooking-stoves.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/06/thermal-efficiency-co... . I found this on the human-powered cranes article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10499228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10499228) -- and it's arguing that the developed world should go back to open cooking fires! Admittedly, the argument isn't very strong (the grid may be dirty, but it's not _that_ dirty); but it's interesting and strange that it can be made at all.

48 points by r721 11y ago

"We know what's best for rural Indian poor" proclaims millionaire with her own catering. Still, at least India has a rocket going to Mars even if its children don't have toilets and clean water.

panglott 11y ago
Reminds me of RFK's 1968 trip to Appalachia while the Apollo program was underway.
monochromatic 11y ago
> "We know what's best for rural Indian poor" proclaims millionaire with her own catering. Of all the (many, many) things that are worth criticizing about Hillary, I'm not sure this is one of them.
denzil_correa 11y ago
> Still, at least India has a rocket going to Mars even if its children don't have toilets and clean water. Fallacy of Relative Privation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation
- SixSigma 11y ago
  Like Kim Il Jong eating while his people starve, I guess that's the same fallacy
  - nivla 11y ago
    That is not the same fallacy. That is one person who controls the nation sitting on an immense amount of wealth while his people starve. India doesn't have a huge wealth tucked under its bed that it refuses to redistribute to its citizens. Let me put this into perspective for you, even distributing 1 billion dollars to its citizens barely makes each person richer by only a dollar!
    - SixSigma 11y ago
      Thanks for the perspective, I feel so stupid. I'm sure spending $1bn on clean water and sewage in the some of the most populous cities on earth would be equally pointless.
nivla 11y ago
> Still, at least India has a rocket going to Mars even if its children don't have toilets and clean water. These arguments are the worst as it conveniently misses the mark of the real world conditions. Yes India did spent on the Mars mission (a whopping $74mil) and in turn it actually got contracts to do launches for other countries and private corporations. So all in all a positive return on Investment. You see you start with $X and you make $X*2 which would now serve your purpose better than it would have before. Well on the bright side atleast you dint say lets decommission the NASA until we solve the problem of homelessness in US.
mikeash 11y ago
Is your second sentence a sarcastic suggestion that they shouldn't be sending rockets to Mars and should instead put those resources towards helping rural Indian poor people? If so, what makes your ideas of what's best for them any better than this person's?

stevetrewick 11y ago

>Perhaps more research could apprehend what actually works No, not really. Since the obvious solution (i.e. the one that has worked everywhere in the world it's been tried) is affordable grid scale electricity - which at this point means fossil or nuclear - and the west is apparently hellbent on preventing the devolping world from having this, it's unlikely any future research will come up with anything of any actual utility.

pjc50 11y ago
The developing world cannot afford nuclear. The developed world can barely afford nuclear; see Hinkley Point C, on course to be the most expensive source of electricity in the UK. There isn't really a grand conspiracy to prevent the developing world having fossil fuels either. Developing world countries aren't not building power plants because of the Kyoto agreement, which barely binds them, they're not building them because of the usual mix of disorganisation, corruption and lack of access to capital.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  I bet the 418 million pissed away on these stupid stoves would go a long way there. Maybe instead of trying to give them bits of civilization in the wilderness, we ought to just bring them out of the fucking wilderness entirely and be done with it.
  - panglott 11y ago
    Maybe it would be a good idea to try building a working electrical grid that can deliver power to rural areas before trying your hand at a nuclear power plant?
- merpnderp 11y ago
  Vietnam is building out nuclear at an incredibly fast rate. Hardly a wealthy nation. They'll get 100 years out of those reactors.
eveningcoffee 11y ago

eveningcoffee 11y ago

I do not have time to read this bag of words but I searched for the word "chimney" and I did not find it. See, there is your problem and a big fat hint for a solution. Most countries in northern hemisphere solved this problem more than century ago and it amazes me how this solution is not even mentioned once.

intopieces 11y ago
Lack of research and cultural context is the reason the plans proposed in the article failed to begin with. You fell in a similar trap, it seems.
- FussyZeus 11y ago
  What in the culture anywhere prevents installation of a chimney? And if it does how is the ONLY reasonable response "your culture sucks, build it anyway so you stop inhaling actual bull shit"?
cc438 11y ago
These populations aren't mentally incompetent, they use chimneys. The issue is that chimney's aren't 100% efficient and only remove the pollution from the home, not the surrounding environment. The pollution becomes pervasive when an entire city of 100,000+ people is cooking with biomass fuel. Your chimney's exhaust is just another person's air when it's as concentrated as you'd find in places like those described in the article.
- clock_tower 11y ago
  Look at the woman in the article picture: she's not using a chimney, and she has to squat to cook. German women were cooking standing up (building fires on raised stone platforms), with chimneys to vent away smoke, in the 17th century. (See Fernand Braudel, _The Structures of Everyday Life_.) Draw your own conclusions: pathological loyalty to tradition or lack of imagination; or severe lack of capital and calories; or what?

aaron695 11y ago

Sounds to me like it is working, is what happened. > Although these cookstoves produce fewer emissions than open fires, burning biomass fuels in them still releases plenty of toxins For toxins that actually matter, that's smoke in layperson terms. So what if the benefits are only partially there. It still rocks. It makes me suspicions that the study where all the stovetops were no longer being used, was just picked as an example because it failed. And as to electricity and gas being better, that's nice, the doers can continue down the biomass efficiency road while this is still being discussed.

benp84 11y ago
That was my take-away too. They had an idea to fix a problem, it worked but not as well as hoped, so now they're learning and iterating. Sounds like any experimental project (or startup). They got 28 million stoves out with a budget of $10m/year (times 5 years?). Big deal if they haven't saved the world yet.

pakled_engineer 11y ago

A solsource solar cooker I gave to a friend's family in the Rajasthan desert still works as advertised a year later. These are desperate needed around refugee camps where locals clash with refugees looking for firewood.

bcg1 11y ago

Ethanol stoves are actually great for this problem... very low emissions, and fuel that is easy and safe to store and can be produced locally. In many parts of the world, there are abundant non-food sources of mash... kelp, mesquite seeds, cattails, etc... and community scale production is much more efficient than the bizarre government subsidized ethanol industry in the US that uses GE corn with that requires a lot of energy input and has a high energy cost for transportation to and from the centralized production facilities. I'm not sure how it is "undeveloped" countries but around here is quite illegal to make your own fuel in this way however... it is, after all, the "A" in BATF. It seems that without addressing such issues, the "clean" stoves will not be popular because locals would need to keep paying some "authority" (government or otherwise) for access to the fuel, and money is much more scarce than dung in many places.

panglott 11y ago
"the more complex stoves that run on electricity or burn liquid fuels typically cost more and require access to a steady and cheap supply of fuel, which often isn’t available in rural villages."
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  Are you claiming that rural villages will be unable to produce their own ethanol? In what parts of the world do you see that being a problem?
vonmoltke 11y ago
> I'm not sure how it is "undeveloped" countries but around here is quite illegal to make your own fuel in this way however... Not sure what you mean by "in this way", but it is quite legal to make ethanol fuel for your own use in the US.
- bcg1 11y ago
  You have to get a license from the BATF to do so, and you are limited to 10,000 gallons per year (which is plenty). To get the license you have to give them permission to enter your property without a warrant to inspect whenever they like, and you have to keep meticulous records to account for every gallon produced. By "in this way" I meant a means through which normal people can make their own fuel with a low barrier to entry and little or no risk of fines and/or jail.

kirk21 11y ago

Solar panels + batteries will have an enormous impact in a lot of countries. Once ppl buy a stove it is 'free' to use vs having to buy fuel every time (like pellets or ethanol). Will take 10-15 years but it is coming. Combine this with satellite internet and the living standard will radically increase.

reitanqild 11y ago
Cooking use very much energy compared to led lamps or even tvs.

zeveb 11y ago

> “As yet, no biomass stove in the world is clean enough to be truly health protective in household use,” says Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California at Berkeley and the leading health researcher on cookstoves. My understanding is that rocket stoves[1] are extremely efficient and non-polluting. Is that incorrect, or are rocket stoves not profitable for the concerns promoting this sort of effort? > “With their system of government, they can kind of dictate what happens,” notes Jim Jetter, a senior research engineer who tests cookstoves for the EPA. Well, yes, it helps if one can sentence holdouts to the laogai. > much like some American cooks like the flavor of meat grilled over charcoal. Only some? I'm pretty sure that everyone prefers the flavour of food cooked over good lump charcoal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove

clock_tower 11y ago

While we're at it, check out http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/06/thermal-efficiency-cooking-stoves.html http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/06/thermal-efficiency-co... . I found this on the human-powered cranes article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10499228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10499228) -- and it's arguing that the developed world should go back to open cooking fires! Admittedly, the argument isn't very strong (the grid may be dirty, but it's not _that_ dirty); but it's interesting and strange that it can be made at all.