He crystallized his concerns in the journal Science in 2002 with what he now says was an intentionally provocative commentary titled “In Praise of Petroleum?” “Rather than excluding petroleum, some of this one-time gift from nature ought actually to be reserved to help fulfill our obligation to bring the health and welfare of all people to a reasonable level,” Smith wrote.

The main reaction at the time?

“I never got so much hate mail,” he recalled.

That resistance has proved stubbornly persistent, Smith said. Those interested in clean cooking efforts have spurned propane simply because it seems politically incorrect. He called the Alliance’s enduring and expensive belief in biomass stoves of a piece with that history.

“The major international and bilateral development agencies and donors have either ignored or unofficially opposed providing clean fuels to the world’s poor on flimsy and I would say unethical climate grounds,” Smith said in an interview.

For Smith and other disappointed advocates in the fight against household pollution, the story of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves seems depressingly familiar — another tale of well-meaning Westerners keen to help poor people in the third world, ignoring evidence that their methods might be ill-conceived.

Priyadarshini Karve — a noted Indian designer of low-emission stoves, including the now-abandoned stoves in the village of Nandal — said she’d focused too much on funders’ fuel-efficiency standards and not enough on what actual women cooks sought in a stove.

“The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves focused on replacing a traditional stove with a product made in a factory because that was the easiest thing to do,” Karve said in an interview in her gadget-cluttered office in the city of Pune. “Everyone jumped on it as a win-win situation. Poor households get something and we get money.”

The Alliance brought resources and a spotlight to the effort, but she questions how much it accomplished.

“I really don’t know if, even with the megabucks and glamour, the situation at the ground level is quantitatively different than what was happening before,” Karve said. “Have people’s lives really changed? No one knows really.”

Andrew Revkin contributed to this report.