Page 24 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

Worldwatch Institute, Winrock, etc.), and both an established and nascent appliance manufacturing base (e.g., Philips, Bosch, BP, Shell, Aprovecho, Envirofit, WorldStove, First Energy, etc.), Phil, Bill and I arranged two seminars held at State in April 2009. As you might imagine, an invitation to a seminar at the State Department sent by a “Senior Science Advisor” will generate a larger and more positive response than an invitation from a mere academic. The first seminar was introduced by Dr. Fedoroff and featured Dr. Mark Bryden, the president of ETHOS. The second featured Prof. Kirk Smith, Professor of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. Both had been involved in cook stove research and related issues for over a decade.
The seminars were very useful in focusing the attention of the State Department on the policy opportunities that a cook stove improvement program could provide. It also iden- tified Phil, Bill and me as cook stove points-of-contact for other interested offices within State and other agencies.
One value of working in Washington, DC, was apparent during the next phase of this effort. It focused on the creation of the cook stove workshop we wanted to hold in Southeast Asia to bring together an international mix of experts who could characterize the current state-of-the-art and collabo- rate to identify the way that science and technology could improve cook stove performance, measure the effectiveness of those improvements, and open the way to creation of an industry that could distribute 200 million stoves each year. Every U.S. government agency which might contribute to the workshop had its headquarters in DC, as did many NGOs. The excellent subway system (i.e., the “DC Metro”) made it possible to get around the greater Washington area to hold face-to-face meetings with potential workshop participants and potential sponsors. For some of the most relevant agen- cies, such as NSF, DOE, USAID, EPA, the UN Foundation, and the World Bank, we would typically arrange several (as many as six!) meetings at each of those agencies within that one year.
The ASEAN-U.S. Next Generation Cook Stove Workshop was actually held in November 2009, a few months after I had completed my one year of residence in DC. We were fortunate to generate financial support for the Workshop that included over ninety registered participants plus a variety of students from both the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) and other Thai universities in the vicinity of Bangkok. The participation of many Americans was fund- ed the National Science Foundation’s Office of International Science and Technology and many ASEAN participants were funded by State Department Foreign Assistance Funds. About a third of the participants were self-funded and the Asian Office of Aerospace R&D (Tokyo) of the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research provided funds directly to AIT for their support services. In addition to the US, other coun- tries represented at the workshop included Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, Swaziland, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Figure 3 shows the workshop organizers with Alexis Belonio from the Philippines, who developed a clean-burning rice- husk stove. Papers were presented in sessions that covered
the current state-of-the-art, stove characterization and test- ing, combustion and fuels, utilization of stove waste heat for electrical co-generation, sensor needs, scale-up, and design for large-scale deployment. There were also several “break out” sessions to which each participant was assigned to dis- cuss the session topics and then present the results of those discussions to all other participants.
The Research Road Map, a report that Phil, Bill and I co- authored summarizing the Workshop’s findings was pub-
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nomic justification for the required investment.
Cum hoc ergo propter hoc (Correlation does not imply causation)
It will never be possible to determine accurately the impact of the work that Phil, Bill, and I did to stimulate poli- cies and programs that support the development and deploy- ment of improved cook stoves. Although we were the first to promote this issue within the State Department, it was clear that the issue was gaining visibility within the foreign policy community through the simultaneous efforts of many others as well. A very good article appeared in The Economist while I was in Malaysia,30 and the following year, Wallack and Ramanathan published an article on “The Other Climate Changers” in Foreign Affairs.31
It is true that Secretary Clinton announced the creation of the UN Foundation’s Global Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves during the (Bill) Clinton Global Initiative32 at their annual meeting in New York City on September 21, 2010, which coincides with the opening of the UN General Assembly. It is also true that the State Department now hosts the Cook Stove Interagency Working Group (CIWG) that is charged with the coordination of all U.S. government agency participation in the UN Foundation’s Global Alliance, and that Jacob Moss, formerly the head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Partnership for Clean Indoor Air, has moved to the State Department to head the CIWG. Bill and I continue providing our input as members of CIWG and I continue to serve as a member of the Global Alliance’s Technology and Fuels Working Group. I have to admit that these facts do demon- strate a major change in the State Department’s involvement from 2008 to 2010 and I like to think that Phil, Bill, and I played an significant role in that transformation.
You also cannot underestimate the influence of lucky
coincidence in policymaking. The current Chief Science
Officer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy
Efficiency and Renewable Energy (DOE/EERE) is Dr. Samuel
F. Baldwin. After receiving his Ph.D. in Physics, Baldwin
went to West Africa and worked on cook stove improve-
ments. That experience resulted in him writing a 300-page
manual entitled Biomass Stoves: Engineering Design,
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Although the production of a 48-page report required a significant effort, such a detailed document was important to nucleate action by other U.S. government agencies and the UN Foundation, focus efforts on the rele- vant scientific and technological issues, and provide an eco-
lished in March 2010.
Development, and Dissemination.
It applied basic thermody- namic and heat transfer science to this problem and has been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese and
20 Acoustics Today, April 2011