 Before it happened, most of us thought about fossil fuels only when we filled up our cars. Then the whole extraction industry collapsed and we realized that something more important than transportation was completely dependent on these fuels. That was the food system. We never thought about the fact that from growing and harvesting to processing and transportation, our food was made using fossil fuels. This is the story of a family trying to cope with the loss of those fuels. We have to grow, harvest, and forage for ourselves in a new world. It's called food and again. Our top story tonight, gas prices soar as oil producers declare a halt in production, citing an undisclosed complication. From all back down in Russia to the United States and Canada, oil companies have turned off the taps, at least temporarily. As soon as I saw the news, I knew I had to start getting to work. I'm kind of lucky that my job has made me think about fossil fuels, society, and collapse. I used to be an archaeologist and I wrote about the rise and fall of ancient complex societies like the Aztecs, the Romans, Mayas, Incas. This all made me realize how dependent our way of life is on fossil fuels. Just like the Romans needed fresh conquest to keep their empire going and the Maya depended on the monsoon rainfall. We need petroleum, coal, and natural gas to drive everything in our world. According to the news, the entire extractive industry has suffered some sort of crippling collapse and we're stuck with just the fuel we have on hand already extracted. Right now they're calling it gasageddon, but pretty soon it's going to become foodageddon. This is going to get really bad. It's winter now, but it's going to be spring soon and then it'll be winter again. It's going to be trouble. We've got a whole bunch of chickens. I don't know how I'm going to feed them. I don't grow food for chickens. I don't even know where to start growing and getting food ready for them. What are we going to do? We need them for meat and for eggs. Plus they're nice to have around, but what are we going to do if we can't just pick up feed at the store? I mean, people had chickens before we had fossil fuels, so we should be able to have chickens afterwards. I just have never done it, so we have to figure that out on top of everything else. At least we've got a rooster. We should be able to grow chicks this spring. Probably not a bad idea increase our flock since we're going to have to depend on it. Plus the chicks are really cute. Right now, what do we know? The news says that there's been major catastrophe in the extractive industry. It's rather vague. I don't know the details. They don't provide a lot of details. They just say that for right now, fuel production and other fossil fuels are kind of shut down until further notice, which is kind of ominous sounding. You know, we have the strategic petroleum preserve. I don't know if they're going to tap into that, how long it's going to last. I don't know at this point right now. It is the very beginning of February. At least, you know, the system seems to still be functioning at least in the interim. So, you know, right now we're kind of business as usual, but we certainly are thinking ahead. What are we going to do next and what's going to have to change? About 80 to 90% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, so we're going to have to really change things around quickly, even if it's just a shortage for a few months. We're really lucky now. We have the postal service. It'll bring us anything, anytime. We just have to order it online. It's easy. That's not going to happen after, well, I don't know, a couple of months. That's going to be not possible. It's definitely a lot quieter around here. I won't mind that, but we're going to have to plan ahead, buy what we need now, get it sent here, and hope that we thought of everything. It's the beginning of February right now, so we've still got snow here in southern Wisconsin, but we have to start thinking ahead right now. We're lucky in that we've been turning our yard into a garden for a few years, but we don't have that much space. It's basically a suburban lot out in the country. Next time, we'll go into a bit more detail about our greenhouse and our growing operations and our other infrastructure, but everything that we're going to eat is going to have to be grown here. And luckily, if we can do it here on a quarter acre, a lot of people in the suburbia or other places could do it on a small amount of land. Okay, so the news is some sort of catastrophe that shut down the gas production and fossil fuel industry in general is crashing. The industry isn't saying much about why. They're putting out things that announcements that there's something wrong with the supply chain and they're anticipating not putting out any fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. I think we should plan for the worst. What's your inclination or what do you think so far? I think that this is all a stunt to raise prices ridiculously high and get subsidies from the government because, yeah, I'll just stop it there. I don't think it's true. I think it's all BS. What rating are we doing? I have no idea. Yeah, I think it's just the oil industries colluding to raise prices and there aren't going to be any antitrust violations coming down the pipeline because they're probably benefiting from it. So you're like OPEC did in the 70s where they made the gas shortage artificial. Okay, so why don't you introduce yourself since it's the first. Who are you? I'm Lauren. I am Scott's wonderful boy. A rational support animal. What's Casey then? I'm a puppy girl. I'm a puppy girl. I know it looks like a lot this year but we have a wood fired greenhouse and on one hand that's great. We'll have greens all year round. But on the other hand, that means I got to get a lot of wood together and you have to get the wood together for next winter, this winter so it can dry over the summer. It's work now with my truck. I can drive out and get wood and bring it back and split it. But next year it's going to be a whole different ball game. It looks like a lot of wood and we can go through two cords right now. Chords four feet by four feet by eight feet. So I don't even know what it's going to be like next year when we don't have fossil fuels to heat our home and also our greenhouse. Three, four cords. Easy and that's just to keep things from freezing. I worry that people aren't going to take this seriously until it's too late. So I'm Scott Johnson. I work at the Low Technology Institute. I'm actually the founder and director of the Low Technology Institute. And essentially our nonprofit is here to develop strategies to house, clothe and feed ourselves when fossil fuels are no longer available, which happens to work out really well with the recent news. So we have been asking ourselves for years, what would happen if fossil fuels disappeared? That's the premise of the institute. And we've been looking at this question and trying to figure out how could we survive when that happens. And a lot of the things that we've come up with and have worked on are what you call low tech solutions. And low tech doesn't mean, you know, sticks and rocks, although we do use sticks and rocks. Well, it's the simplest means to achieve an end. And the example I always give of that is, you know, a microwave meal looks like a really simple thing. You take it out of the freezer, you take the top off, you pop it in the microwave, you eat it. But that simplicity belies what goes into that. All the energy to heat it, to refrigerate it, to process it, to grow it is quite a lot. There's a lot of production there. And so, you know, something as simple looking as a microwave meal is not simple at all. It's a lot simpler, believe it or not, energetically and through a whole bunch of other measures to grow food on your own property and eat it. And so we've kind of been working on this for years in a serious fashion, but not in a dire emergency situation. But now, with the news that fossil fuels are disappearing, we're going to have to put these things into practice. You know, in my mind, and I'm sure a lot of other people have done this, I've thought about like, what if there was a gas shortage? Or what if fossil fuels somehow became unavailable? What would we do? And you know, you kind of think through these scenarios. But when it comes to food, without food, a lot of things quickly become less important. A lot of revolutions in history have started because of food. The French Revolution coincided with record high bread prices. You know how like there's a murder of crows and all these other kind of silly mass nouns for things? I like to say that a large group of hungry people is called the mob, right? And without food, everything else, again, just becomes completely superfluous. So for us, the number one priority isn't heating or water or anything like that because we have those, at least we have the water taken care of. Heating, we can work out. But food, food's going to be the number one issue as fossil fuels become scarcer and scarcer. How long do you think we should plan for? Self-sufficient. I don't know if it's a matter of having to plan for self-sufficiency. I think it's a matter of, yes, we're going to have to budget our gas intake for the few months, but then we're going to need to learn to just re-budget for a new normal, again, of whatever this heightened gas price is going to be. I don't think this is the end of days. You know, I think this is... My hopes are dashed. Do you want it to be the end of days? End of fossil fuel days. No, I don't think fossil fuels are going anywhere. I think people love their fossil fuels too much. And again, I think it's just a business tactic. Also, it depends on if this was a man-made issue or if it was a naturally-caused issue, but we don't know yet, and so hopefully more information will come out, which, again, is why I think it's all stunned. So we aren't the average people. No, but we've been here two years, so people could pretty much catch up to us if they put their mind to it. And follow lowtechinstitute.org on the blog. Yes, exactly. We could catch up to ourselves in a year at this point. If this happened three or four years down the road, yeah, we would be so far down, so much farther on that we couldn't have made that up. I wouldn't have made it in the ground green house. I would have made a less labor-intensive greenhouse. But you could conceivably turn, like, Rin's backyard into this in a year. Easy. Rin doesn't have as much backyard. Yeah, but she has plenty of sunlight. You know, they live in suburbia. They could turn their backyards into this much easier than we had to clear a brush. We had to do all this stuff. We're okay for the first month. We can be generally relaxed about it, but then if it hasn't fixed after one month, then the second month we need to start being more careful. Third month, more careful. Fourth month, more careful. So if you're right and it's just OPEC or whoever screwing with us, then great. And we haven't changed anything. I haven't changed anything. All right, let's see how things are in a month. If fossil fuels are gone, then we'll be glad that we listened to me. Do you have any immediate worries? I worry. How do I phrase this? Oh, you're not worried about the whole scenario about gas disappearing. You're worried about how I'm going to react to it. You're worried. I'm worried about some overreaction from Scott and needing to calm him down and come back to reality. Okay, well, right now the reality is fossil fuels are not available. Yes, but by tomorrow morning everything will be fine. All right, so how's this going to work? Every Friday, more or less, there should be a new video up. So you should click the subscribe button. I'm sure there's somewhere down here somewhere. And then you'll be notified when a new episode's out. Every week we'll show you what we've been up to that week, what we've been growing, what we've been doing, what we've been preserving. We'll share news as it happens, as fossil fuels continue to disappear from our way of life. What's new in the world? And as best we can tell, how's that going to affect us? We will talk about the new restrictions that we've had. You know, when we run out of gas, we can't drive to the grocery store. We will let you know all that. In addition, we're going to do a podcast. And that podcast will be a bit more behind the scenes talking about the research we're doing, that we're basing all of this on. And we'll also be jotting this all down. That means we'll be recording how many hours we work, what kinds of food we're making, how much of each food we're growing, what sorts of inputs we've put in. Just the real nuts and bolts, the real energetic cost of all of this food growing, and also the production. And we'll also share some recipes, because we're going to be eating a lot of potatoes. I can tell you that now, and I'll talk about potatoes. I'll probably do a whole episode on potatoes. No joke. Potatoes are totally worth it. But we eat a lot of potatoes, and you need a lot of different potato recipes in order not to get completely bored eating just potatoes. So we will have all this formal reporting on the website, so you can check that out under the food again tag or link. We also would really love to have your contributions, send comments or get in contact with me at Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. You can check out the whole thing at lowtechinstitute.org. That's our website. If you are interested in volunteering and you live in the southern Wisconsin area, get in touch. If you are with a business or organization that has to do with gardening or some ancillary food preservation or antifossil fuel, whatever, and you want to work with us, also get in touch. So tune in next week. I think the best thing to do is to really introduce you to our operation here. We'll show you the greenhouse and the solar panels, the garden beds, which are under snow right now, the chicken coop. We'll see the bees. We'll kind of maybe do a little bit of a tour around town just to kind of give everybody a real context of where we're coming from, where we're living and what we're trying to do. So stay tuned for that. It should be out next Friday. Again, subscribe button. I think that's all we have for this week. I hope you're doing okay. Good luck and take care of yourselves.