 to a close and it has been a doozy, but then so is 2021 and 2020 for that matter. Today we're going to run down the top stories from a low-tech perspective and explore what is, could and should be happening to get society to transition to a more sustainable future. This is the Low-Tech Podcast. Hello and welcome, I'm Scott Johnson from the Low-Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 62 on December 30th, 2023, coming to you from Hoth Ice Base. No, just kidding. It's Low-Tech Recording Booth in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thanks for joining us today, we're reviving our tradition of a year-end news roundup. 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, lowtechinstitute.org, there you can find both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. 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This year has a lot going on and we're going to cover the Russian invasion of Ukraine, COP 27, the continued COVID pandemic and others like monkeypox and RSV, humankind returning to the moon, the so-called fusion breakthrough, Elon Musk inflation, climate related disasters and then we'll wrap up with a cute animal story. We are not going to cover some of the most talked about stories like the Uvaldi shooting, the overturning of Roe versus Wade, queen dying, anything related to former President Trump or other minor events. And I say minor even though these are really big deals, but compared to the existential crisis the world is facing, these simply rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic as the saying goes. In other words, I don't care about what Elon Musk does with Twitter, but we will talk about other work as it is relevant. After months of preparations, the Russian President Vladimir Putin has launched a major military operation against Ukraine. In the spring, Russian invaded Ukraine to increase its land holdings after annexing Crimea and parts of the disputed Donbas region. Surprising the world, Ukraine stood up defenses, at first comprised of their standing army, hasty conscripts and improvised tactics. When it became clear that Ukraine would hold, much of the world began providing military aid to help the independent country remain independent. This invasion has ramifications for people around the world as Ukraine and Russia were huge suppliers of wheat, corn and fertilizer. You can hear more about this on episode 48, where I discuss this impending problem with William Mosley. Since that May 27th interview, the cost of fertilizer has come down from its high point in early 2022, but ammonia is still double or triple what it was January 2021. Although supply from Russia is an issue, the more strongly tied correlate is natural gas prices, which have risen steadily since last winter. By July, wheat prices had dropped from a high of almost $13 a bushel down to a hover in the $8 range for much of the rest of the year, and although better, this is still higher than in the previous year. But what does this mean for a low-tech future? It points to the need to decentralize production of staples. Depending on the long-distance transportation network of staples is inherently dangerous. We've only done it because of the dirt cheap mobility due to oil. As the future has less of this available, we'll have to be sure that we can produce staples close to home and in a variety of locations, so that if something catastrophic happens in one location, it won't mean widespread hunger. We need all hands on deck for faster, bolder climate action. A window of opportunity remains open. COP 27 was held in Egypt this past summer, and aside from all the attention on dignitaries flying on private jets and the notable lack of protesters in this restricted environment, the nation did have a few tangibles. On the negative side, no real movement away from fossil fuels could be agreed to, but on the plus side, loss and damage reparation funds for developing countries has become a realistic goal. But then, carbon markets remain voluntary, and larger emitters are not pulling their weight. The biggest headline is that countries still largely support the 1.5-degree Celsius target, but now our most are looking at adaptation instead of mitigation. Countries have agreed the climate change express has left the station and it's too late to stop it. Unfortunately, this outcome was heavily influenced by the more than 600 fossil fuel representatives taking part. Instead of promising to phase out their use as climate scientists recommend, they're now going to be quote-unquote phased down. For a low-tech future, meetings like these are largely window dressing. We face a global systemic problem with climate change and the continued use and dependence on oil. Although the best solution would also be a large-scale systemic one in line with the creation of the problem, we are not going to see enough change from the top to make this needed difference. Unfortunately, as the world continues to exist in a mode that forces people to participate in using fossil fuels to engage with the world, it makes it incredibly difficult to transition away from fossil fuels without huge individual costs. This is why we always talk of creating parallel support systems for yourself, your household or your community, alongside your existing way of life. That makes the transition to the new support system smoother and easier than if we were forced to make a radical change immediately. We can't control what national or international bodies do, even if we advocate with them for the changes we want. Most of us will create more positive change where we are and within our communities by doing something tangible and at a human scale. A so-called tridemic is threatening to overwhelm healthcare systems across the country. COVID and other pandemics continue to sweep through the nation after a year of almost no illness in the family and our own family due to isolation. Then a year of on again, off again, colds and COVID. Now we're just in a cycle of continuous stuffy noses around the house and we're pretty average, it seems. This year, Omicron made COVID more transmissible, but less deadly and Monkeypox, now known as Mpox, gained great media attention while only infecting a small number nationally. And then all at once RSV hit many young kids who had not been exposed to it before creating a tsunami of risk, of sick munchkins in the hospitals. And although much of the current so-called tridemic is just media hyping up infectious disease numbers because we've all become more aware of them in the last two years, we are in the midst of early winter, cold flu and everything else season. And as it gets colder, we stay inside and we insist on spreading germs by sharing turkeys and gifts with one another. I'm mostly joking because after years of isolation, it is nice to get sick without having to worry about risking the lives of grandparents to see them this holiday season. A low-tech future will also see pandemics. One downside is that our current medical system depends so heavily on single use, centrally produced and long distance transported goods for everything from syringes to PPE. And without redundant local sustainable production, healthcare will have to pivot hard. On one hand, it would take longer for diseases to spread across the globe if people are reduced to slower travel methods and volumes. As long as our communication system is maintained, we can be prepared and weather pandemics, which will continue to crop up and surprise us. The better we deal with problems, we can see coming, like climate change and fossil fuel transition, the better we will be able to deal with unforeseen disasters because we'll have that extra bandwidth. The agency is currently targeting, no earlier than Monday, August 29th, for liftoff of the Space Launch System rocket that will propel the Orion spacecraft on its mission around the moon and back to Earth. Humans are returning to the moon. This year, Artemis-1 already went up and around the moon, splashing down in December. In 2024, a crewed flight will circle the moon, followed in 2025, by a crew landing on the moon for a week-long mission. The total cost of this is estimated at $93 billion and is seen as a stepping off point for a mission to Mars. I honestly go back and forth on space missions. Having a focused and serious goal, plus the funds to achieve it can create really wonderful scientific discoveries, both in the targeted research and through happy accidents in the process, including smartphone cameras, truck fairings, baby formula, Lasik, temper foam, the bow flex, solar panels, and more. It's something special to see the combined effort and hundreds of thousands of hours of work that go into putting a person on the moon. NASA and supporters point to the surprise discoveries as an additional point towards this investment. The $93 billion to go to the moon is a drop in the federal budget. Almost $700 billion are spent on defense each year. A year of universal health care would cost us about, sorry, $450 billion, and we spend about $513 billion on it right now with our private system. Amazon will likely be spending $1 billion on making the Lord of the Rings rings of power series. So how do we compare all these things? I'm not really sure, $93 billion. So a low-tech future, though, is unlikely to finance moon shots. We can make accidental discoveries by spending a lot of money on other projects, projects that solve real-world problems that could have a lot of money dumped into them instead, creating small distributed energy systems or developing a low-input crop that would be useful in a localized future. Just at the end of the year, we had the so-called fusion breakthrough where a fusion reaction generated more energy than was put into it. The headline is that about 3.1 megajoules were produced with just 2.05 megajoules of applied laser energy. That's about enough energy to power my refrigerator for about three hours, or really about 0.875 kilowatt hours. But this really isn't the whole picture. A friend of mine who will remain anonymous used to work in the fusion project at the local university. He pointed me to the fact that 300 megajoules were needed to power the lasers to create that two megajoules of light to make the reaction go. So the true ratio of energy in to energy out is nowhere near even. So the question is, is fusion the future for a low-tech world? The sci-fi fan in me says, if we could make little fusion reactions that are fail-safe and could fit in a shed on each block, that'd be a great way to power our future. But like I commented on Twitter, we're already using fusion power here at the institute. We have these panels on our roof that capture radiation from the big fusion ball in the sky and create electricity. Recently, we created five times the amount of energy of the breakthrough. And that was on the winter solstice on a cloudy day. The realistic part of me says that wind turbines and other equipment that a regular handy person could build and maintain would be a better long-term option for power than depending on fusion. I could be wrong, but until that happens, I'm putting my eggs in the DIY basket instead of the one marked science will save us. In a historic vote last month, California state regulators agreed to ban the sale of any new-powered gasoline cars by 2035. Lately, Elon Musk has been in the news for his takeover of Twitter, but that's beyond the scope of what we spend time talking about here. Again, it makes no difference who owns Twitter unless it has bearing on how seriously people begin to take the transition. Now, the point of talking about Elon Musk is really to bring up electric cars. I've talked about how we can just switch everything to electric and continue as usual. Check out episode 53 for more on this. And while places like Europe are already set up with a better public transit infrastructure, the U.S. is special in that it has prided itself on its reliance on the use of private vehicles. But I'm not gonna opine on the morality of this. And while I think a robust electric light rail network connecting cities, suburbs, towns, and villages would cover the transit needs of many of us, if we think about the practicality of it, the U.S. is a big country with a dispersed population. Some areas are just gonna have to have individual vehicles. So is the electric vehicle the way to go? Is that what our future holds for us? Especially for those of us that are obligate drivers like us here in the country. For us, a low tech solution is one that a handy person could build, repair, and maintain in a reasonably equipped shop. Obviously, some machines need specialty tools and knowledge and the high end of low tech would be something that could be repaired in a community shop, perhaps with the help of another. Now in that scenario, could I build a lithium battery? No way. Are there other options? Absolutely. Right now, this very second, we could create biodiesel from underutilized resources. If we're making fuel from carbon that's in the active carbon cycle right now, we're not gonna be contributing to global warming. Climate change is driven by digging up sequestered carbon and putting it in the atmosphere. Turning algae into diesel and then burning it is just releasing the carbon absorbed by that algae that would have been released as CO2 when the algae died anyway. Better might be to create a biodigester and turn compost and other so-called waste materials into the equivalent of natural gas, a methane, and use that to power vehicles, which is reducing the emission of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. But that requires more complex machinery and know-how. What about, and stay with me here for a minute, hydrogen to power vehicles. Hydrogen has a terrible name because of the Hindenburg airships explosion, and well, it may seem dangerous to drive around with a tank of hydrogen just to consider that people already drive around with propane tanks and gallons of gasoline right now. Fuel contains a lot of energy, no matter how it's stored and any accident carries risks regardless. So aside from the safety perception, hydrogen is a great alternative. It's easy to make through electrolysis, which is basically two bare wires in a tank of water with current running through it. Bubbles of hydrogen and oxygen form on each lead as H2O separates into its constituent parts. The hydrogen can be collected and plugged into a modified internal combustion engine. The only exhaust from this vehicle is water vapor. People have built such systems in their own garages so this passes the low-tech test. Hydrogen cells could be swapped out at service stations, requiring less time than filling with conventional gasoline. But then, if we have light rail systems reaching far into the communities surrounding cities, we'd only need to drive to the nearest station, hop on our long-distance rail system, and long-distance drives would be less appealing than high-speed rail. And these can also be run by hydrogen cells, by the way. Inflation in the U.S. is the highest it's been in four decades. And new numbers out today give no reassurance it will let up soon. This year was also dominated by inflation, where a nonprofit and we do not take partisan sides on any issue. We point out facts related to things going on and can take positions, but we cannot, and I don't want to, advocate for any politician or party. Generally speaking, the right has argued that inflation is due to the government's spending and aid programs. The left blames the war in Ukraine for raising oil prices and by extension everything else, as well as supply chain issues such as China shutting down factories amid COVID outbreaks. A helpful article from NPR also points out that corporate profits have gone up at record rates throughout the price hikes, meaning that as costs rise for consumers, companies see it as an opportunity to raise their margins. Now, I am not an economist, but I do enjoy thinking and learning about these things. And it could be the case that everybody is right. Inflation is when too many dollars chase too few goods. So not only has the government spending added dollars to the equation, the war in Ukraine and Chinese factory shutdowns have made fewer goods available. It's both. What then is the low-tech answer to inflation? The more you can do for yourself at home, the better. Here's why. Imagine growing and canning tomatoes to put in your basement to eat over the winter. You have a quart of generic organic crushed tomato costs $2.49 at Madison's Whole Foods last February, but now it costs $3.39 each quart you canned is valued at almost a dollar more each. And obviously you're not gonna solve every economic woe in this way, but this is just to illustrate that as prices rise, the value of doing it yourself goes up. But, and this is the important part, it costs you the same amount of labor or work to do whatever it is you're doing. I didn't come up with this understanding. This is a guy named Ralph Borsodi, an economist who fled New York after the crash in the 1930s and took up homesteading. Hear more about him in Low-Tech Podcast, episode 25. We concentrate on growing the high value difficult to transport foods here in our own home, which means when costs go up, they hit those foods first. So we haven't really been affected by rising prices on meat, eggs, and other items. Honestly, of the products we do buy, it's just dairy products that have gone up noticeably for us. This does extend beyond food. The more you can take care of for by yourself, the less buffered by costs you'll be. From scorching heat waves to heavy flooding, extreme weather events have caused widespread upheaval with thousands of people killed and millions more displaced. The warming world was certainly felt this year. Europe experience is worse drought in 500 years, over two thirds of the continent. And China also had to shut down factories on the Yangtze Basin. Record flooding and wildfires were too common. What does this mean for a Low-Tech future? A changing climate means we have to be ready for greater variability in our planning. Instead of worrying about a drought every decade, it might be every few years. Areas with high rainfall might become drier and vice versa. Most areas will become warmer, which is especially true the farther north one travels. In 2018, Matt Fitzpatrick of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science put out a map projecting your current location forward 60 years into the future. I've linked to it in the show notes. Madison, Wisconsin, for example, in 2080, we'll feel like today's Kansas City, which is almost seven degrees warmer and 16% wetter. Each region will have to come up with a different approach, but overall that means abandoning some plants and varieties that don't grow well in the new regime and adopting new ones that can thrive. This likely means learning new skills and recipes to go along with the new plants. Our homes will likely need to be more resilient and for many of us built with cooling in mind as well as heating. We hope to talk about earth tubes in the future, which can cool a house in many places with just the use of a box fan, which draws much less energy than an AC. Dry areas can think about evaporative cooling and everyone can consider building architecture that is passively heated and cooled by its design rather than power. But I don't talk much about climate change explicitly for a few reasons. You can hear the whole argument in episode 43, but basically it's hard to motivate people for the vague threat of a few degrees warming in 50 years. Instead, people should think about how we're going to massively change our energy sources in the next 25 years, namely no longer using oil and gas. That has a palpable effect that people can imagine. Additionally, making systemic and individual changes now can help mitigate climate change. So really, we're after two birds with one stone, even though we focus mostly on the obvious bird about to hit us sooner. Governor of 1890 or wrote a letter saying that he was landed in 1882 fully grown and fully grown is about 50 years of age. Let's not end on a down note. Jonathan, the Seychelles tortoise turned 190 years old this year. He is the oldest living animal on the planet. In 1882, already 50 years old, Jonathan was brought to St. Helena where he continues to live on the grounds of the governor's mansion. Although blind and unable to smell, he happily ambles along with his mate, Emily. During his lifetime, practically every aspect of humans' lives have changed from chattel slavery and the U.S. ending through the entire reign of Queen Victoria and Elizabeth II to World Wars, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and much of the industrial and all of the digital revolution. Think about his life in this way. He lived before fossil fuels were a huge mode of power. Coal was just used in factories, but electricity was practically non-existent. He may well live past the end of the use of fossil fuels. If oil is no longer tenable in 25 years and we sunset natural gas and coal by coming to our senses, even if that takes 50 years, he'll still only be 240 years old, which is still 15 years shy of what may have been the longest-lived tortoise or any animal that we know of. It seems like changes on a large scale take forever, but I guess that's just the view from the short 70 to 80 years we as humans have on this planet. Or just enough, that is to see a third of Jonathan the tortoise's life. That's it for this week. The Lotech podcast is put out by the Lotech Knowledge Institute. The show is hosted and co-produced by me, Scott Johnson, and co-produced and edited by Hina Suzuki. This episode was recorded in the Lotech recording room in Coachville, Wisconsin. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, Stitcher, and elsewhere. We hope you enjoyed this free episode. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com slash Lotech Institute and signing up. Thank you to our forester and land steward level members, Sam Brown, Mahill, and Scarfaud, and the Hambuses for their support. The Lotech Knowledge Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants, and underwriting. If you'd find more information about the Lotech Knowledge Institute, membership, and underwriting at LotechInstitute.org. Find us on social media and reach me directly from Scott at LotechInstitute.org. Our inter music was lost on the freeway off the album, Lost 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, take care, and happy New Year.