 We've got 1,650 billion barrels of oil left in the ground. We're burning through them at a rate of 35 billion barrels a year. That gives us 47 years of oil left, right? Actually, probably not. Have you ever thought about how your life will change in a generation? We have, and this is the Lotech Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from the Lotech Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 53 on August 19th, 2022, coming to you at Lotech Institute's gardens in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm introducing our transition rubric and why we need to start building redundancy into our lives now. We'll also have Institute updates. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno. Like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, LotechInstitute.org. There you can find both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts and unless you hear me doing the ad, somebody else is making money on that advertising. While all our podcast videos and other information are given freely, they do take resources to make. And if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of the community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page, patreon.com slash Lotech Institute. Thanks to Ryan W. and Meg S. for signing up recently. If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website, LotechInstitute.org. This episode is brought to you by the Poor Pearls Almanac. Hey, this is Andy. And this is Elliot. And we're the Poor Pearls Almanac. We talk guns. Gardening. History. Ecology. Collapse. Agriculture. Hunting. Wait, guys, what about bears? You know, in boats? Oh yeah, that too. If you're wondering what's wrong with the way we're living today, you're not wrong. And if you want to start thinking about solutions for when that check has to be cashed, you can find the Poor Pearls Almanac wherever you get your podcasts. This, this isn't a podcast. We're a commercial on a podcast. You don't need to tell them that. So check out the Poor Pearls Almanac wherever you find your favorite pods. As part of our work, we table out events around Madison and Southern Wisconsin. Many times people ask us, what exactly do you do? And it's a fair question. We do research on topics from potatoes and bees to compost and solar hot water systems. We work with fiber and spinning and hunting and butchery. And it does seem like we're all over the map. And it's true because life is broad and complex. Today, many of us are what anthropologists call craft specialists, where we are very expert at doing a narrow range of things. Before industrialization, which is to say before fossil fuels became a mode of power, people had to have a broad range of skills. Maybe they weren't experts in any one field, but they could do a decent job in dozens of tasks. So I got to thinking about how to better describe the mission of the Low Technology Institute and it came down to one central question. How are you going to survive or even thrive after fossil fuels are no longer available? Our tagline of course has been housing, clothing and feeding ourselves in a fossil fuel free future. Try to say fossil fuel free future five times fast. Fossil fuel free future, I can't even do it. So today we start conversations by asking the questions, how are you going to thrive without fossil fuels? Through this question, I hope that people will start to consider seriously some of the changes that are coming up. First, let's talk about the problem we face. Then we'll move on to what the Institute is doing about solutions. By the numbers, the US Energy Information Administration says we have 47 years of oil left. That's 1,650 billion barrels left in the ground and we're using 35 billion barrels a year. We have 52 years of natural gas left. We have 6.9 trillion cubic feet in the ground and we use 0.14 trillion cubic feet a year. And we have a whopping 132 years of coal left, meaning 1,139 billion short tons in the ground and we use about nine billion short tons a year. That's what we currently have under the ground. Let's look at these numbers from a few dimensions though. But spoiler alert, no matter how we look at it, we've got to be done with fossil fuels in a few decades. On the environmental side of things of the 1,500 gigatons of carbon dioxide admitted since industrialization began, most of it has come in the last few years. As total annual emissions continue to rise, we're currently putting out over 35 billion tons of CO2 per year. Let me reiterate that. Most of the emissions have come in the last 20 or 30 years. Most of the emissions. So since the mid-1700s, we put out a lot, but in the last 20 or 30 years, we put out most of those emissions. If we burned all the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, coal alone would double our total cumulative emissions in the last 275 years. All told, we have another 2,700 gigatons of potential CO2 in the ground right now. The International Energy Agency states that we can only consume a third, a third of the remaining fossil fuel reserves if we want to stay under a two degree Celsius, tempester rise. That means if we draw down fuel use in the proportion of today's energy mix, we'd only have a couple decades of fossil fuels left to use. But if we look at it strictly from the industry point of view, ignore the environment. The only real viable fuel for long-term use is coal. We could dig out coal for another 100 years easily. But obviously we shouldn't do this, not only for emissions reasons. Coal is incredibly dirty and causes health hazards in addition to more emissions per unit electricity than other fuel sources. So although coal would be technically available, its effects make it non-viable. And don't get me started on clean coal. There's no such thing as clean coal. It's a myth. What the industry is trying to do is retrofit the equivalent of giant catalytic converters on coal plants in order to reduce some of their emissions of greenhouse gases. Or they try and pump emissions underground into porous rock formations. As of right now, there is no viable scrubber or carbon capture and sequestration technology that significantly reduces emissions from coal plants. And the cost of installing them will be large enough at scale that it makes them economically unfeasible. That's why they don't do them. Why should we try and patch a broken and failed system instead of ramping up other technologies that are already proven on a smaller scale? Now if we turn to gas and oil, you might think that we have half a century left. And we do if you divide the known sources by the current conception. But, and this is an important point, usually left out of these discussions, the last bits of oil and gas are too hard to get out of the ground. So-called tight oil and gas require more energy to extract, making them cost more. And at some point, the price of oil and gas will be higher than the alternatives, making them economically unviable, even if it was technologically possible to extract the last barrels. Again, we're looking at a couple of decades of oil and gas before things get prohibitively expensive. So I'm often asked if I worry about climate change. And while it's important to keep our eye on the problem of climate change, I worry that too many people see it as an indistinct threat. If I tell you that the world is going to warm more than two degrees Celsius in the next 50 to 75 years, does that give you existential dread? I've studied this stuff and know more than a reasonable amount about the paleo-climatological record and how it's constructed. And that's just to say, I understand the climate science, but I still don't feel any fear in the pit of my stomach when I'm told about two degrees warming. It just doesn't scare me because it's so abstract. Humans didn't evolve to think in geologic time scales. So I focus what I talk about on fossil fuels because a response to both climate change and the finite nature of fossil fuels is to stop using fossil fuels. But people can wrap their minds around fossil fuels running out and how they need to change their lives rather than a vague threat of seemingly barely warmer temperatures. So when I don't focus on climate change explicitly, what we are doing is actually fighting climate change. If you want to hear more about the Institute's thoughts on climate change, check out podcast number 43, where we talk about the movie, Don't Look Up. Now let's turn to what we call the transition, which is the Institute's solution to a finite fossil fuel horizon. The Institute was founded on a chain of logic. First, as I've said, our current way of life is dependent on fossil fuels. And these are a finite resources. And therefore we should transition our lives as soon as possible to exist without them. This is not radical. Radical is thinking our way of life will not change drastically in a quarter century when oil is effectively gone. Transitioning to live free of fossil fuels has beneficial side effects. On a large scale, it reduces greenhouse gas emissions and helps fight climate change, as I said. It also makes transitioners more resilient against other disasters, from power outages and natural disasters to pandemics and supply chain issues. It also helps insulate us against personal disruptions, such as job loss or illness. So what does a transition look like? You might think a transitioner is someone who lives off the grid, deep in the woods. And while a person living like this is probably better prepared for the loss of fossil fuels, that isn't the only way to go about it. You can think about building resilience into your everyday life wherever you are. And I do apologize about the background noise. I'm out in the garden and my neighbor is apparently sawing something in half. So a suburban transitioner would have a house and a yard, but instead of grass, tidy gardens and fruit trees might fill the lot. Solar photovoltaic and hot water panels might be on the roof and passive solar heating ducts may be visible in the house walls. Inside the house, reverse osmosis filters provide clean water along with storage tanks. The basement has shelves of canned and dry foods that are cycled through the year. There's a battery bank to run the essential utilities and lighting at night. And even all this built-in resilience, the family still enjoys and benefits from our current way of life. Maybe they have a freshwater pool, doubling as a non-potable reservoir, for example. But when unexpected problems arise, they can fall back on these redundant systems they've built into the house. Urban transitioners living in an apartment face more challenges due to space constraints, but that can't stop them from having more food in their pantry than they need at any one time. A half-dozen, five-gallon drinking water jugs can be cycled through during normal times to provide weeks of drinking water if needed. Even small urban lots can grow food, although community gardens or other spaces might need to be found. Even renters can take advantage of solar power and storage with modular portable units. And because they will have built relationships with other transitioners, they'll have options for moving if the disruption is long-term. Rural residents are already partly transition because they often possess backup heating systems and space dedicated to growing food. The options for locally-derived water are greater as is the space for power generation. The challenge for rural transitioners is largely cultural. Fossil fuel, especially diesel and gas, run everything out here. I can hear some of you out there talking back to the podcast, asking if this is just a fancy way to become a prepper. And this is not prepping as it's commonly understood. Prepping is also called survivalism, and this concept is understood as, quote, gathering materials and making plans in preparation for surviving a major disaster or cataclysm, such as a worldwide economic collapse or war, end quote. Instead, we're advocating for a systematic transition to live without fossil fuels today, now as part of your everyday life. If that happens to enure you against other disasters, all the better. But we have a few important differences with preppers. First, even though survivalism and transition have some overlap, that's just coincidental, to focusing on sustaining human life, which requires water, food, and shelter. Both survivalists and transitioners think about water, food, and shelter after a major systemic disruption. The differences, though, are important. Survivalists are often focused on security and stockpiling. They typically focus on maintaining themselves and their immediate family. They're also motivated by a variety of concerns, from nuclear or biological war to EMP or monetary collapse. Others are led by religious or other supernatural beliefs. And yes, a subset of preppers are also concerned with peak oil. But our transition rubric does not deal with security. Instead, we focus on building community. We do not encourage so-called bug out bags or isolated bug out locations with hordes of food and ammunition. Although having a reasonable amount of food and water on hand is prudent, we urge people to cycle seasonal food through their storage. This is more of a pre-industrial model, not a post-a-lot, pocalyptic one. We advocate for creating systems, not stockpiles. And we understand that we are not self-sufficient. If anything, we are locally interdependent. We build connections with neighbors and local ecosystems. Instead of a reinforced bunker or isolated hideout, we encourage villages and neighbors to work together where they are. That is unless you live in the most dense urban areas, which have not been sustainable in history without fossil fuels. Urbanites are gonna have to spread out. This is also not meant to be a fallback position. We have no in case of emergency break glass sign on these ideas. They're meant to be integrated into your everyday life. Starting small and working up to more resilient redundant systems is the best way to go. As a wholesale overhaul of your entire life is too disruptive and hard to maintain. I wanna spend a quick second focusing on one of the words I just used and that word is redundant. Today, redundant has become a dirty word because it's not as economically efficient as the alternative. A factory that has extra parts on hand sitting in a warehouse has redundancy built into its supply chain. And economists will tell you it's better to keep the money from buying extra parts and put it in the stock market or some interest-bearing account and then buy the parts when you need them. This is called the just-in-time shipping model and I talked about it at length in a podcast. That would be number 41. I'm not gonna rehash that here, go back and listen but think about your household. Are you a factory? Can you just stop eating when the supply chain is disrupted and shut down production? Can you stop drinking for a few days? No, of course not. So the best thing to do is to have redundancy. If one stream of water is cut off you can turn to your second. If one source of food is no longer available you can make use of your redundant food system that you've already built in. So what does this look like in concrete terms? It means having extra of all the things you need on hand. Transitioning doesn't mean you have to have a giant storage facility in your basement or a bunker. Let's take a can of beans for example. Let's say every week your family eats a meal that involves baked beans. Friday night is baked beans night. So every week at the grocery store you buy a can of baked beans to start thinking about transitioning for the next month buy two cans of baked beans every week. The oldest cans get used first. After you have four extra cans go back to just buying one can each week. If your supply chain were to be disrupted you would still have four weeks of baked beans on hands and Friday night baked beans would be saved. This is kind of a silly example but it illustrates what you can do with everything you have on hand. Not just beans. If you have a month's worth of your regular necessities on hand because you've built them up in your supplies you'd be fine for a month. Not only if we had some catastrophic fossil fuel crash that's coming in the next decades but if we have supply chain issues too much inflation, a natural disaster or even a personal disaster like losing your job or becoming ill you're all set. The next level would be to start growing some of the beans yourself. This requires more up from planning and time but once you start growing your own beans you can save seeds and produce at least some beans for yourself perpetually. This idea can be expanded to other areas. Beans are just a goofy example because everybody recognizes that beans are inherently just kind of funny. So I've been talking about this being a systemic transition and what does that mean? If you go to lowtechinstitute.org slash transition you'll find what I call the transition rubric. I have a list of seven areas of needs for human survival. For each area I've listed what we would need to survive for a week, a month, a year or perpetually without fossil fuels. The areas are arranged in descending order of importance. First is water. We can go three days without water. Then comes food which we can survive for about three weeks without food and then clothing and shelter without which you could survive for well anywhere from hours or months depending on where you are and what time of year it is. And then power which encompasses everything from electricity to cooking and heating. From there we move on to so-called waste management and community building. So let's look at an example of a household that wants to start down the path of transitioning. The first stop on the transition train is to think about these systems in order that you could survive for a week as fossil fuels become less available or if you find yourself in a more acute disaster before. Before then, like a, say, Texas-sized power outage. You might want to have one gallon of water per person per day stored where you live. This could be a row of five gallon jugs that you cycle through on a regular basis. You want 2,000 calories per person per day of shelf stable goods including oils, fats and snacks. This can be as easy as having extra of your regular foods on hand. For that week, this household would want enough seasonal clothing on hand as well as some basic shelter. It would be a good idea to have a small backup battery and solar panel at least to provide power for lights in the evening and charging cell phones or radios to keep up to date on the current situation. For waste, this family would need at least a toilet paper and a shovel to bury not only human waste but also other organic waste that might attract vermin. And finally, it would be best to have planned all this with another household with whom you can share resources and help when it's needed. This is especially true if you live in an apartment and have less access to space. That would be the absolute minimum, the beginning. And again, remember, this would be helpful in a long-term power outage situation or other disaster. It doesn't just have to be a static thing waiting in the background for a disaster to strike. Cycling water and food becomes part of your everyday life. Now if we jump to look at the last stop on the transition path, a household that could survive perpetually without fossil fuels. This is the end of the spectrum of resilience. We see a bigger change in everyday life for sure. But remember, this is a transition. It's gradual and should be worked up to over time making these redundant systems part of our everyday life. While the amount of water and food per day doesn't change, the biggest difference is that we have transition from having purchased extra to producing our own. Now we'll see systems in place to support our life rather than a stockpile. So to produce a gallon of water per person per day, we're going to see household scale purification systems that run on grid or backup power. We'll see non-potable water storage for watering the garden and other uses flushing the toilet. The figure of 2,000 calories a day will stay the same but much of that food would have been grown in the gardens or hunted in the area for the neighborhood and then canned, dried or otherwise stored for use throughout the year. Clothing would not only have to be available for each season of the year but a way to wash, repair and even make new clothing would need to be in place. Shelter in a perpetual contact means having a house or dwelling that not only functions independently of outside power but also is repairable and improvable with the materials that are locally available. Power would need to be provided by solar panels, wind or micro hydra with some storage or lights and a few appliances. Heating and cooking would need to be fueled by some redundant backup systems such as wood. Even if the grid is relied upon now for everyday heating and cooking, we'd have these backup systems in place. Waste management includes turning a waste product into a usable benefit like composting organic waste back into the garden soil and having a plan to deal with inorganic waste as well. Finally, this household wouldn't be alone. Having 10 or so households within walking or biking distance that are also on the road to transitioning would be a huge benefit. Not only for sharing work and resources but also just having a sense of community and a difficult time and you'd probably be surprised at how many other people in your neighborhood have thought about these sorts of things. It doesn't take much to get the conversation going. Maybe sharing this podcast would be a good starting point. Over the next few months, we're gonna dive deeper into each one of these areas of local independence and redundant systems. In the first transition episode, we'll talk about water. In another, we'll discuss food and we'll keep discussing clothing, food, shelter, power, waste and community. And I hope to find an expert in each one of these topics to bring on to chat about these systems as we go along. So please subscribe to the podcast feed. Wherever you're listening right now to be sure to hear about each episode as it comes out, you can also get a preview by checking the transition page, lowtechinstitute.org slash transition. And now for a brief recap of what we have going on around the Institute. On Saturday, we'll be having the first of a three-part workshop on turning flax into linen. Talk about making your own clothes. This class involves breaking the dried and redded flax stalks and separating the pith from the fibers to create long strands for spinning, which will happen next week. We've been really busy with finishing up garden work before the winter and getting our fields prepped for winter wheat and rye. Please subscribe to our YouTube page to see new videos about wheat and other homescale grain production coming soon. That's it for this week. The LowTech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. The show is hosted and co-produced by me, Scott Johnson, and co-produced and edited by Nina Suzuki. This episode was recorded in the Low Technology Institute's gardens as you could hear in the background. Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere. We hope you enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute and signing up. Thank you to our Forrester and Land Steward-Level members, Marilyn Skripon, and the Hambuses for their support. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants, and underwriting. You can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute, membership, and underwriting, at lowtechinstitute.org. Find us on social media and reach me directly at Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Our entry music was Sleep, off the album Basic by Hallezana. That song is in the public domain. And this podcast is under the creative comments, attribution, and share like license, meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Thanks so much and take care.