The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Kris De Decker: "Looking Back Towards a Human Powered Future"

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

On this episode, Nate welcomes back journalist, inventor, and low-tech expert Kris De Decker to take a deeper dive into a more human-powered system on the backside of the carbon pulse. Through both historical and experiential lenses, Kris shares five creative alternatives to current high tech systems - from hot water bottles to electric buses and preventative-focused healthcare systems. Could a move towards communal services and human-power also shift our mindsets to think twice about how much energy is actually needed to thrive and still be comfortable? Will society willingly move from a resource intensive growth economy towards a lower energy, human powered economy?  About Kris De Decker: Kris De Decker shifted from a journalism career covering high tech to exploring low tech through formal and personal research and projects, including the Human Power Plant and the Solar Powered Website.   De Decker is creator and author of Low Tech Magazine and No Tech Magazine, publications which explore low tech solutions to questions society assumes must be solved through high tech.   De Decker has contributed articles about science, technology, energy and the environment to Mother Earth News, Techniques et Culture, Design Magazine, The Oil Drum, Resilience, EOS, Molenecho's, "Knack", "De Tijd" and "De Standaard".  De Decker's books "Energie in 2030" advised the Dutch government on challenges related to science and technology and his book "Stralingswarmte: gezonde warmte met minder energie" provided a guide for how heat works.    For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/75-kris-de-decker  To watch this video episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4MYqRvm7vX4

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Returning to the Great Simplification is author and low-tech enthusiast Chris Decker. Chris joins us from Barcelona, Spain, where he is the author of Lotech magazine and no-tech magazine publications, which explore appropriate technology solutions to future lower resource material energy human futures.

Chris is back today to give examples of five categories of appropriate technology. For instance, hot water bottles that provide energy services to humans, cooling, heating, transportation. He's been researching prior civilizations and they're used. of appropriate technology. He knows a lot about this topic. This is a fascinating conversation to me because I think our culture just assumes

that we're headed towards some George Jetson, more gadgets, more things, more stuff. But energy underpins all that stuff, so we're going to need technology. But maybe not the type of technology that we expect. Please welcome Chris Decker. Hello, Chris. Hello, Nate.

Good afternoon. It's morning here, afternoon in Barcelona. Exactly. I am happy to have you back on the podcast. I have your books and magazines here on low-tech magazine. And I wanted to have you back for a little bit deeper dive on some of the intermediate low-tech examples that are out there. era. And here's why. I think our cultural narrative is fighting to maintain economic growth,

high technology, globalization, just in time supply chains. And the things that you and I talk about and the topics on this podcast are conceptually makes sense, but we're not emotionally getting the signals that these things are going to be in a reality. Yesterday I had a podcast with a woman who's working on sustainable packaging from locally grown materials like potatoes and algae in Lebanon. Lebanon has had a 50% drop in GDP and she's living the low tech lifestyle. And so I know you are a world expert on all the variety of the type of more available less complex technologies we might use in the future.

So I thought today you might just choose five or six of those and give us a story and some outlines on how those might be appropriate in a resource and energy and complexity-constrained future. That was a big bite. All right. Sounds good. I'm not living in Lebanon though. It's hard though, right?

because her point was that they're forced to do it now. And exactly, we can imagine that these days might come, but we're not forced to do it yet. So you as a, as a human being, have forced yourself to do these things and learn about them as a, as a vocation.

So that's why you're an important, your knowledge is an important bridge, I think for more people to understand these things. Yeah, you could say that in a way I'm imagining living in Lebanon, although I'm living in Spain where everything still works. But yeah, that's a good summary. Yeah, excellent. So we've had a few emails.

Where would you like to start? I think one thing that you have written on and talked about is solar power is great. Solar power is not going to power a 19 terawatt global growing system, but it could, in combination with human power, provide energy and brain services, which is ultimately what we want from technology anyways. So can you explain what the combination of solar power and human power might look like and give us some examples. Yeah, first of all, I think that when we discuss energy sources, we tend to forget one of the most important ones, and that's human power.

Historically, humans were the main source of mechanical energy. So for heat, we used fire, of course, and biomass. but when it came to mechanical energy, we had some help from windmills, from animals and from water mills, but most of the work we did ourselves. And if you see like the cities that we're still living, like medieval centers of cities,

yeah, they were built by hand. Canals were dug by hand. Even the Panama Canal was dug by carnal was dug by guys with shovels and and all tools were human operated the washing of clothes making products it was all dependent on human power and if you if you look at today's situation then we have mechanized every single physical effort like we don't even open the doors anymore i've seen battery power pepper mills so we went from from one extreme to the other and when you compare human power with solar power it's it's like it's a very interesting comparison because like one one human can

generate more or less the same amount of power as a one square meter solar panel in on a sunny day and and on a cloudy day it's it's comparable to a much bigger solar panel i mean we we can produce much more power than a solar panel and the big difference between human power and solar power is that obviously solar power depends on the weather it depends on the time of the day depends on the seasons while humans are just like fossil fuels they they can produce power whenever it's necessary humans are baseload um exactly that is why they make such a good combination but The advantages go are, there's more advantages. Like, yeah, solar panels don't grow on trees.

They don't fall out of the sky. You have to produce them in factories. And, yeah, humans don't need to be produced in factories. We kind of self-replicate by means of human power. And it's also the only power source that increases as the human population grows. So everything else needs to be shared among, a growing population. And in practical terms, it's a very all-round energy source.

So you can produce mechanical power, obviously, but that can be converted to electricity. But when we're active, we are also producing a lot of heat, which is very useful. And human waste can be converted into fertilizer and biogas for cooking, for example. But I think what's the biggest advantage of human power is that when you have to produce your own power, first of all, you're going to think twice about how much power you need. And that is what's missing now in the whole discussion about renewable energy. We try to kind of green make the supply sustainable, but we're not talking about reducing energy demand. But say you want to watch a movie and you have to provide your own the power for that,

then probably you're not going to watch it on a flat screen television by yourself. You're either going to watch it on your smartphone alone or you're going to power smart the flat screen but make it into a cinema and project a movie for the whole neighborhood. So people that watch the watch. this podcast sometimes come away with the impression that I am anti-renewable energy, and I'm not. I think that in tandem with declining fossil, flammable fossils and declining economic growth, that renewables can contribute to a meaningful human culture and civilization.

but I had a couple weeks ago someone come out to the office here to give us an estimate on solar. And they wanted 30 of those panels that you said are equivalent on a sunny day of one human. So this is the conversation that's being had is we want to continue our robust, convenient, richer than kings or queens of old energy lifestyle by adding lots of mechanized helpers. And the conversation about using less and still getting the rewards of living a life of meaning is not yet in the public discussions. Maybe I could get five or eight solar panels that would really help my life. I don't need 30 of them.

So can you dive in a little deeper on human labor in combination with some solar inputs, some solar panels, etc? What can we accomplish and what are some examples there? Yeah, so I've set up a system in my own apartment here that is a combined solar human-powered system. So it uses a hybrid charge controller. that's actually hybrid solar wind because human power like I have a bike generator it's it's very similar to wind turbine so you need a different type of controller and the problem like with any the biggest cost of any off-grid solar system but you can also kind of the same happens on a large scale

like the whole power grid you can consider it an off-grid situation too is that the main problem is energy storage. So if you look at the costs, for example, about 80% of the costs of a off-grid system are the batteries and the charge controller, but mainly the batteries. And also in terms of like the energy that you invest in the system, it's like 70, 80%, it's the batteries. And the great thing about combining a solar system with a human power generator is that you can make your battery storage much smaller because the bike can always take care of extra energy source. I mean, we humans, we are power sources, but we can be considered batteries. And so what I do here is that basically during the summer, I have enough solar energy

and I don't need the bike generator. It's also, it gets too hot to use it anyway. But in winter, I can low, I mean, I don't need that much battery storage because on low power days, I can go sit on the bike for an hour and I have lights for the whole evening. So that's also a reason why human power production, it's actually today, these days it's more interesting than, say, 50 years ago because we have, for example, we have lead lights which consume very little energy.

And, yeah, just an hour on the bike is enough to light up my apartment for the rest of the evening. And also like the bike generator itself, it's like early in 20th century technology that didn't have that in the middle ages. So we can do much more with human power than now than we could 100 years ago. And so in winter, it's not just that I can say top up the battery and kind of, yeah, my I become the battery. but at the same time it also keeps me warm because when you're sitting on this bike for 10 minutes even and you're pedaling hard, you're not cold anymore. So you actually save much more with heating costs than with electricity even. So it's a beautiful combination in that sense. And for the human power plant, this art project that I'm doing in the Netherlands, we actually envisioned a whole neighborhood that works in that way.

So the people, the whole society is, it's a utopian vision, but the whole society is run on human power. But from the moment there is solar power available or wind power available. Well, humans don't have to do anything anymore. It's just the wind and the sun take over. But it's making it, them kind of combining them, allows you to use solar and wind without an enormous energy storage infrastructure. you would otherwise need. I heard stories that back in the day, 200 years ago, 300 years ago,

when in Holland there were all the wind, windmills, that when the wind was blowing, then people went out and did work. But when there was no wind, then they had siesta's or did other things. Is that true that the work schedule was, based on the flows of the sun and the wind, contrary to now, where everything is 24-7 access to electricity?

Yes, exactly. I did a lot of research on that, and indeed, windmills were only working when the wind blew, and that fact was just accepted, and it was not just a windmill here and there. You had a huge industrial areas with thousands of windmills together. And it was not just windmills, also sailboats work in that way. I mean, a sailboat does not move when there is no wind.

So there was no other choice but to wait and do other stuff meanwhile. The economy, was the economy centered around that intermittence? Yeah, so indeed. Of course, the Netherlands is a very windy country, just like Barcelona is a very sunny city. But even then in the Netherlands, say the common approach was to use wind when it's available, but when, for example, there was a period, say, of a week or two weeks when there was no wind, it even happens in the Netherlands. It's rare, but it does happen.

Then they had a backup power source, and that were animals. So, for example, for very important industrial processes like milling the grain, they used horses and other animals to keep the production going. But that was much more expensive. Animals were much more expensive to use than wind. So it was only used for production processes that were really crucial. Like food production, you could not really wait three weeks because then everybody dies. It was already there, this combination of wind, an intermittent power source,

and a more reliable, say, living power source. What you just described is a 200-year-old microcosm of what we face today. Our backups are going to be more expensive and maybe triaged towards the really important industrial processes if there are energy disruptions, et cetera, in the future. The second question on what you just shared is the issue of time. So many of the things that you're talking about are easy technically, but it requires you, in this case, to get on your bike and do something when in our culture time is money.

And if we optimize for energy efficiency and energy availability, we have to input more of our human time. And that's a big cultural shift. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, well, up to a certain extent, of course, when I'm on the bike, I can keep working. I mean, I can work on my laptop while I'm pedaling. So that's not really an excuse.

But of course, you're right that especially when you want to rely on wind and solar. and I think that we're not going to rely only on human power because then we're going to enter quite dystopian future scenarios, I'm afraid. But if you want to switch to intermittent power sources to run your economy on, then yes, you're going to have to completely, you're going to have to adjust the economy and daily rhythms to the weather and the seasons and the time of the day. and like there's a lot of things you can do with a solar panel during the day that you don't need energy storage for so for example if you want to use a power drill

you can do that entirely without batteries you just connect the wires of the solar panel to the to a power drill and you can you can drill as much as you want as long as the sun shines and these things of course there are other things that are say like a refrigerator needs 24 hours a day electricity but even that you can solve with solar panels without batteries in the sense that if you use a very well insulated fridge then and the solar panel cools it during the day and it's the temperature stays the same during the night because of the very good insulation so there's many technologies that can be adapted to use um renewable power when it's available without having to use chemical batteries. My colleague DJ White, who I wrote three college textbooks with, he uses solar panels in Hawaii and he lines his freezer with milk jugs filled with salt water as kind of a buffer.

There's all kinds of ideas like that, I imagine. Have you tried things like that? I am building one of these frieches. as we speak. But I recently also discovered some people in the US who are building a similar technology for cooking. So it's basically a kind of fireless cooker, but then with a heating element inside.

So you connect it directly to the solar panel, and it's like a slow cooker. It's just with very low power, like with a 100 watt solar panel, You can cook a meal and it takes like seven, eight hours depending on where you live, of course. And if you add a bigger solar panel, it just goes faster. But you can, so even cooking you can do with very low power solar panel if you are prepared to kind of change your routine in the sense that you're going to have to start cooking in the morning if you want to have dinner at night. Yeah, in the summer here, we have a solar oven.

which is just a small rectangle with plastic on top. And you can put a pan of rice or chicken or whatever in there. And it takes six hours sometimes. But it works quite well. And it's free once I bought the oven. Yes. So a couple other questions. By the way,

in this podcast I did yesterday with Lebanon, the only reason she was able to do the podcast was because her office had solar panels that they had bought a few. years earlier because there's electricity power outages all the time there. Electricity is only on 10% of the time. So this is another example of let's scale solar, but not to replace our current economy, but maybe as a, you know, a hybrid. So another question, Chris, is the type of things you're talking about, are these with the exception of the actual complicated polysilicon wafers made in China,

etc., are a lot of the things you're talking about, can they be made in a local and regional economy like Spain and Portugal and France supply chain with materials, or does this still require a globalized just-in-time system? Yeah, the solar panel itself is obviously quite problematic. There may be ways to build solar panels that are, say, kind of more, which require more low-tech production processes. I did an article on that a while ago, but that remains to be seen.

So if you're talking about using solar power or wind power, there's like different ways to do that and the best is of course to use old-fashioned the old-fashioned way and that's to direct to not produce electricity but have a mechanical kind of you can do that with a windmill it's very obvious you have a mechanical connection between the blades and and the machine that you are powering and with solar it's a bit more complicated but you can do it with a heat engine like early 20th century there was a lot of work done on that. And those things are

much, say, much more resilient in that sense that you can build them anywhere. And the solar cooker that I was talking about, like the one you mentioned is of course the most low-tech version. So you just need a, yeah, you just need a piece of glass

basically, a pane of glass. And, but also the electric cooker that I was talking about. you don't need really much materials and you can use a lot of it's actually easier what I learned from these studies to to get this done in Africa than to get it done here because for instance there you have aluminium foundries in many towns where you can where they can build a pot that is exactly suited for using such a machine and here you cannot get it.

my friend Simon Mischot is going to be in Brussels in a couple weeks talking to government officials working on renewable energy things and his belief is that we won't be able to scale renewable technology to the decarbonized goals that are set out due to limitations on copper and nickel. but that we can scale this technology using more simple minerals like sodium, fluoride, zinc, etc. And that's where the real innovations in a post-growth civilization will have to go. Do you have any thoughts on that? I didn't really look into that. But obviously there is not enough material available to address the energy. demand with solar panels and wind turbines. There's too many rare materials that you need for that.

So it's definitely one thing that we should be looking into. But at the same time, I think that it should not distract us from the real challenge and it's how to live a modern, comfortable, happy life without that much energy. Well, let's move on to the second cat. The first category was human power in combination with some solar power. The second category is we talk about the HVAC systems, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning to heat and cool buildings and spaces. But in this appropriate lower tech future,

Your work focuses on heating and cooling people instead of spaces. Can you expand on that? Yes, so let me start with heating because cooling is pretty similar, but it kind of is handier to keep it apart. So modern heating systems and cooling systems are pretty peculiar things. What we do is we heat the entire volume of air in a space. in order to make people comfortable. And yeah, well, with cooling is the same.

You're going to heat, you're going to cool the whole volume with the air conditioning system. And there's maybe a few people in that space. And it's extremely energy inefficient. It's comparable to cars, actually, where 95% of the energy goes into moving the vehicle instead of moving the passenger. And our modern heating and cooling systems are very similar in that sense. Yeah, I'm right now in an eight-room building that the whole thing is being cooled, but I'm the only person in the building right now. I'm just sitting here doing this with you.

So it's just like driving a car. But go on, sorry. Yes. Yeah, so if you look at how people were kind of finding thermal comfort before the Industrial Revolution, or actually, you don't have to go that far back. Before the 1950s, there was no central heating systems. There was not this ample supply of fossil fuels that made it possible.

And so the strategy was totally different. They were heating people instead of spaces. And there were different ways to do that. The first is to use a radiant heat source, and that is, of course, originally the fireplace, but then later it became the stove. And that is a different type of heating. So the share of radiation is much higher than the share of convection.

And that means that you're not creating an equal temperature in the whole space. The closer you get to the heating system, the warmer it gets. And the further away you get from it to cooler it gets. So what people did was actually creating a microclimate of thermal comforts in a rather cold space. and people could choose where they would sit or stand. So if you were too hot, you moved away from the stove. And if you were too cold, you were coming closer or you were going to sit on top of it. And that's, of course, much more energy efficient in the sense that the energy use is independent of the size of the room.

And you can be comfortable at lower air temperatures, because you increase the share of radiation in the heat transfer, and you can be comfortable at a lower energy temperature. Like radiant heat is comparable to the heat you get from the sun. And we all know this effect. If you are, say, in winter, you are sitting in the sun, it can be quite comfortable, even if it's like only, say, 10 degrees Celsius. But if then someone comes to stand in front of you,

suddenly the air temperature remains the same but suddenly you're cold because this person takes away your radiant heat source and the second thing was that people used made use of personal heating devices that works through conduction and conduction is another type of heat transfer that is actually a physical contact between a heat source and a human. So, of course, the temperature needs to be lower or you get burned. Like if you touch the cooking fire, you're going to get burned. But if you have a lower heat, lower temperature heat, like a hot water bottle, you can directly transfer heat from the heating device to your body. And that's, of course, the max in thermal efficiency.

You need very little energy to keep yourself, comfortable. And so originally these personal heating devices, they were based on kind of synthals from the fire. So people just took glowing calls from the fire, put it in a

ceramic pot, put that in a wooden box, and then put it under their feet, for example. And the clothes from those times, they were like kind of working together with that. So they were draped over the heat source. And you were literally

the heat was rising into your clothes across your body. And again, you can be comfortable in a room that has low air temperature because you created a microclimate that heats yourself. How long ago were thermal hot water bottles a thing, like in culture? Was that several hundred years ago? And a secondary question, you would heat that up before you go to bed and you sleep with this bottle. But then at 3 in the morning, I would assume all the heat had dissipated.

Do you go refill it then? Or can you tell us a little bit of more about that? Yeah. So hot water bottles, they show up in the records around like 1600. And then, like I said, they were kind of used with glowing coal. So it was quite dangerous. You also had the bedpan. So it was like glowing coals under your mattress.

And then when the water supply came in the 19th century, then people switched to water as a heat storage medium, which is, of course, it's better and safer. And first, these hot water bottles. were made out of ceramics and out of metal. And then in 1900 and something, the first rubber hot water bottle was invented. And concerning your second question,

indeed people always think that these hot water bottles are meant for use in the bed, and that they are very useful there. And actually, if you have in winter, if you put a hot water bottle there in the morning, it's still hot because the blanket is very well insulating the heat but they're also especially useful outside the bed like when for me it's my only heating system and in winter when i'm sitting here i have a hot water bottle on my lap i have one if necessary behind my back and if it's really cold i have

another one below my feet and yeah every two hours or one two hours i get up i refill them and i i come back. I mean, you have to move now and then. It's not healthy to sit on your laptop without interruption for so long. So yeah, it involves some human labor also. Do people on your street there in Barcelona refer to you as that Belgian McGiver mad scientist guy, or do they have any idea what you do? I managed to hide it for a very long time, but less and less. And actually, I live above a bar. like the typical Spanish bar here and I'm quite often there writing and in winter when I meet my friends here

and it's cold I come down with like four or five hot water bottles and the people of the bar got so interested and they actually want to do it next winter they want to set up a whole infrastructure with hot water kettle and then a rack of hot water bottles and blankets so that they don't have to pay for their gas

terrace heaters anymore which is very expensive expensive. And it might be even more expensive next winter with the whole Russia-Ukraine thing. We don't know what's going to happen there. Yes, so that made it even before. It's probably like, yeah, this guy is a clown, but now people start realizing that it can actually save them a lot of money. I don't even need to start about the environment or the future of our children, but it's just a much cheaper. Well, for the record, over 15 years ago, I knew you were not a clown when I started

following your work when we ran the oil drum. So, um, these, these hot water bottles, they can they be made simply regionally, locally, or is it still petroleum based things that create the, the fake rubber or other different ways to do it? Yeah, you don't need to, you don't need to use rubber. I mean, the only advantage of rubber is that it's kind of flexible, so it's more comfortable. But I also, I have used

metal containers, I have used plastic pet bottles. It's just a container you need that doesn't leak. And that's it. So that's not really the problem. So again, at more of

philosophical higher lens on these things, the mind shift that needs to happen is heating and cooling humans, instead of heating and cooling spaces. And can you imagine how, here's the thing. So you're very familiar with Jevin's paradox. And as we invent more technology that is more energy efficient,

we actually globally end up using, more energy. So as we're growing, Jevin's paradox acts as a positive feedback. But once we're declining in total aggregate throughput, then I think efficiency will go, we'll cut the other direction. Efficiency and these little ideas that you've been suggesting today are going to be really important. I think Jevins would flip once we're in the downslope of the carbon pulse. Do you agree with that? Yeah, totally agree with that. If you combine efficiency and sufficiency, you have a winner. And it's much better than just going for sufficiency because, yeah, then that's not so attractive. You're going to have to give in a lot of things. But actually, like I said,

the fact that I can power lights the whole evening in my apartment with just one hour on the bike, it's it's thanks to energy efficiency. And what you see with lead lights in in the world we are living now, they did not lower energy use. They just gave us much more lights like they gave us digital billboards and everything. But if you in another context where we're kind of in a sufficient context of sufficiency of limits, then lets our. fantastic things, of course. Because with old-fashioned light bulbs, I would not be able to power my own apartment, not with solar and not with human power.

That's why I think it's so important to be having these conversations so that we differentiate a smaller economy from a disaster and focus on the energy services that humans need decoupled from how much GDP is growing. And there are ample responses out there for some intermediate energy and material future. And so I'm very grateful for your continued work on these things. Let's move on to another category, which I've learned from reading your magazine and your articles.

This is the concept where we just talked about, heating and cooling people instead of spaces. Well, if we extrapolate that to apartment complexes where lots of people live, and today's cultural narrative is everyone needs all of the things. But you've written about historical communal services like kitchenless apartments. I think you mentioned in New York City. Can you talk about this concept a little bit? Yes, but I now realize that we forgot to say anything about cooling.

Maybe I should add that shortly. Oh, yeah, please. No, go for it. Like, for cooling, it's basically the same. It's like you can cool people instead of spaces. And the main technology for that is the fan. The fan does not lower the air temperature in a space, but it cools down the person. And the second is the cold water bottle.

So what I do in summer, I enter the bed with a bottle full of ice instead of a bottle with hot water. And it works great. And of course, the problem with cooling, it's harder. It's more challenging than heating because above a certain temperature, the fan, for example, is not working anymore. Like 32 degrees or something and it stops. I mean, it still operates, but it does not cool down anymore. So there you can still use it in a very interesting way in combination with air conditioning. Say if we soon we're going to have temperatures of 40 degrees or 50 degrees, a fan will not do it.

But you could still say the air go, you can put it on 30 degrees or 28 degrees Celsius and then cool down the people with fans and cold water bottles. So you can find a compromise there. Well, that's going to be, in my opinion, globally much more important than heating, given higher wet bulb temperatures and population on the Indian subcontinent and lack of affordability. We're going to need to keep people cool. So what you're saying is not 24-7 super cold, expensive air conditioning, but air conditioning to a certain threshold combined with a fan, combined with water bottles with ice or something

could be some path. Yeah, and of course on a larger scale, what needs to be done is to plant trees and make more green zones in cities because that is also why cities are so unbearable to living in summers now. And the countryside is more or less okay. Right, because the,

the larger trees are, are dissipating the heat and keeping it away from you, which is why shade is cooler. Yeah. Yeah, I have, I have a version of a hot water bottle in my bed. It's called a golden retriever. But in the summer,

she doesn't keep me cool in summer. She has to get down because she's also very hot. Yeah. But indeed, Humans and animals are the original hot water bottles. And that's, if you look into history before the 1600s, how did people keep warm? Well, they were huddling together.

They all slept together in one bed. The cattle, the pigs and the cows were in the living room or just below it. And even the visitors slept in the bed. Like there were all these kind of rules to where a visitor should sleep when he stayed overnight. But so the original hot water bottle is the human and its animals. That's hard for me to imagine. Yes, for me too. Because the last few visitors I had to my house, I just can't imagine all of us in the same bed together.

I would have to have my golden retriever between me and my visitor. Yes. Okay, so let's thank you for bringing up the cooling. I think that's very important. Now, what about the communal services where not everyone has to have a kitchen stack next to each other, but they might share the energy to provide human needs. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so a kind of hype of recent years was the tiny house,

and it's kind of to downsize everything individually. Like you have a very small washing machine, a very small kitchen, But it's like super individual. And it's what you see. Like our households are getting smaller and smaller. Throughout the 20th century, you see the, like in the Netherlands, for example, it went from five people to two people in just 100 years. And everybody needs their own washing machine kitchen cooking stove, refrigerator, shower.

And that's great for the economy because you have to sell all these appliances. but it's not so great for energy use, of course. And so... And it's also not so good for social capital, right? Exactly. You just cook by yourself. Yes. So there was...

I have a lot of data from the Netherlands because I actually did this research in the context of the Netherlands. So there was this research saying that 40% of Dutch people regularly feels lonely. And then there we are, like sitting in our own apartments with our own devices, feeling miserable, basically. And if you look to the past, it was obviously not like that.

I just gave the example of sleeping all together in one bed. It's quite an extreme example. I'm not sure if we should bring that back. But you had a lot of, say, the kitchen, the dining room, the bathroom, the washing room. those were very often community services and they were not happening in the privacy of the home. And the most famous example is of course the Roman bathing house that actually also the Greeks had it.

And in other parts of the world you have very similar things. Like in the Islamic world you have the Hamam. In Japan you have the Cento, you have a very important culture of communal bait. In Finland you also still have it, but it's about the only place in kind of western part of Europe because what happened, Europe was in the Middle Ages after the Roman Empire fell quite an exception in the sense that people stopped washing themselves because of religious beliefs that the soul is more important than the body, so we kind of show that by just not washing ourselves

and stinking hours in the wind. And so we kind of find it a pretty weird idea, but in many other cultures, the concept of communal baiting is not that weird, although it's also under pressure because of Western ideals and technologies and values spreading. It just seems that energy surplus has really fueled individualism as opposed to communal activities. and by the way, we're nearing the peak of energy surplus. Yeah, so we should also kind of question this individuality that has also lots of other disadvantages, like you say. I think many people would be, I don't know, it's quite a culture shock maybe to go wash your body in public.

But if you look into how these things work, and are organized, there are also kind of different ways to do it. Like in some bathing houses, people were naked completely. In others, they were only half naked. Sometimes there was more privacy. So these things are quite flexible also.

And it's also like communal services, kitchens, baiting houses are often associated with poverty. And that's another problem. But if you look at the Roman bathing house and the hamam and the Finnish and the Japanese, that it has nothing, there's nothing wreaks of poverty. On the contrary, like, it was pretty luxurious experience and much more than what we have, we don't have

the luxury in our private bathrooms that the Romans had in their bathing houses. As you were speaking, I was visualizing me in a public bathhouse in Japan and people running in screaming like a Godzilla movie, but I was just, it's morning here and I just had my coffee. So go on to the kitchen. Yeah, so the kitchen is interesting also, but also very much tied to kind of the role of the woman in the household. So it's a totally different story. And in the US, you had this trend towards the end of the 19th century, like 18th.

and it lasted until like 19, 20 more or less, of building kitchenless apartments in so-called apartment hotels. So it was mainly in New York, but also elsewhere, where people had apartment units without kitchen or with a very reduced kitchen, like a kitchenette kind of thing. And you had a communal kitchen and dining room on the ground floor, but not where people join. to cook together, but where there was actually a professional cook, it was like a restaurant in your

apartment building and you could go eat there every day or you could even order the meals up to your room if you didn't want to face the other residents. And this was very much an idea that came out of feminism, so what we call now the material feminists. They wanted to reduce the housework for women, and they kind of promoted this kitchenless apartment. So these buildings also had child care, communal childcare in the building, for example. And it became pretty successful. Like also after 1900, there were many of these buildings. There's a whole list of names of these apartment-towed buildings.

But then what happened in 1917 with the Russian Revolution is that basically the Soviet, stole the idea and they introduced the concept of the communal apartment and it became totally associated with with communism and yeah so so it so it was a good idea it was a good idea but then it got associated with a different political ideology and so it was kind of went out of of favor yes so that was one of the reasons another reason is that it kind of formed a threat to the the idea of the nuclear family and the economy, because what happened after the economic crisis in the late 1920s, so women had entered the working force during the war,

and then became an economic crisis, and there was a push for women to get back to their cooking stove so that the jobs would be free for men again. So it was also economical reasons for that. But yes, this association with communism was, of course, I mean, in the US it's a pretty sensitive thing still today, I think. And it was also, it worked different in the Soviet Union. So it was not restaurants. People actually had to share the kitchen and the bathroom.

There was no professional cook or something. And it was not the luxury of the Roman bade house either. and yeah there's great information online some research done by american scientists actually where they show these apartments it's pretty weird like there's like the kitchen but you have the kitchen is chaired but you have every family has its own dining table its own gas burner and these apartments there still exists But throughout the 20th century, this was the default way to live in the Soviet Union. You had a communal kitchen and bathroom. I have a question on that, but regarding communism, just a quick comment,

even the word socialism in the United States is akin to devil worship. And yet, people don't understand that we are living socialism now, in many ways, but it's socialism for the rich because our central bank continues to guarantee the whole endeavor with artificial stimulus and low interest rates and things like that. We're debasing the dollar. Most people don't have any investments. So their $50,000 in savings is going down in value because of the dollar debasement. but those people that are closer to the financial spigot are doing better.

So we have socialism now. It's a managed market. And yet that term is so pejorative in my culture. I don't think so much in your culture. Not that much. No. But, yeah. So, I mean, yeah, go ahead.

You could call it communism, but you could just as well sell the communal kitchen as an anarchist idea. because it's like when people organize their own things bottom up, you can also have come out with a communal kitchen. Well, I would like to sell it not as anything political at all, but a way to conserve energy, which is about to be more precious, and to build social capital, which is about to be more needed. Yes, exactly.

And that was not also in the US with these kitchenless apartments. it was sustainability was not the drive behind that movement. And of course there were things in the Soviet system. Like, for instance, people were put randomly together. It's not that you could choose with whom you would be sharing the kitchen and the bathroom. So I'm not really arguing to copy the system. It's just that from a sustainability viewpoint, from energy use, but also social interaction, social co-eastern.

vision, it makes a lot of sense to do more of these things together, or at least give people the opportunity to do it. You don't have to force them to do that. So let me put you on the spot here. I know that you're a tech expert on exploring different low energy technologies, and you're not a policy person. But let's just say that people in your country in Spain, politicians recognize that we are headed for an energy and growth constrained future, and they want to provide decent basic needs for humans. And they were to design some new apartment complexes in Madrid or Barcelona. What would you recommend, just if you had a drawing board and knowing the things that

things you do about our energy and sustainability issues, how would you merge sufficiency and efficiency in a brand new apartment building that would house several hundred humans? Do you have any broad brush ideas? Yes, and I would even say they're not that original because these things are actually happening. So, like in Finland, I visited one of these communities. communities where they share a lot of things like not just the kitchen and and and and but like a shower facilities but like guest rooms and kind of workshop room and playgrounds and I mean there's so many things we could share like here in my apartment building we have there's 18 apartments and we have 17 vacuum cleaners like we are the only one

not having it but why do we need 17 vacuum cleaner so also these things could be shared and I would definitely go for a restaurant kind of facility but also what would be very useful is a long a shared laundry space which is also happening in like Scandinavian countries pretty pretty common and it not it saves a lot of space like if you if you take out these household activities out of the private apartment and you make it into a shared space, you win a lot of space in your apartment. And that can be either translated into bigger apartments for all or just more apartment units in a residential building. And if you look at the history of these of these kitchenless apartments in the US, it was actually not more expensive to have a restaurant with professional cooks

on your ground floor than to have your own kitchen. And that was exactly. Because of that. Because if developers could make smaller units and move the kitchen to a communal space, they could provide more units and still earn the same. So it kind of has a lot of, it's quite a win-win situation for even developers of buildings. They don't have to lose money with such an approach. Well, I think the key would be that a developer would announce that that's what they're building and that people choose, I want to go and live in that environment. I think that's the big thing that would need to happen, right? I mean, it's happening here and there.

It's like with this whole kind of idea of the sharing economy, this is kind of part of it. It's just, of course, there's always apps involved, which is not necessary. But also like a laundry, I think the easiest thing to move would be the laundry. also. It's like it's not just taking a lot of space inside a home. It's also unhealthy to have to do your laundry at home. You can also actually argue that from a kitchen, we are polluting our indoor environment every time we cook. It doesn't matter which kind of stove you use. It's the food is burning. So, and the laundry, the same. This entire, this is, yeah, like, like, like, even if you, whether you use a tumble dryer or you're drying your clothes at home, if you're in a kind of humid environment,

it's not very good for the indoor environment. You're going to create molds and everything. So why can't we reserve, like I've seen some great examples, the top floor of an apartment building that is kind of open. And there, everybody can hang their laundry to dry. And in less than a day, it's dry because there's a lot of wind coming through. And you don't. don't have to, you solve a lot of problems in terms of air quality, indoors, energy use, and so on. So this entire conversation, Chris, so far reminds me of a phrase I've been using for a long time, which is we don't face a shortage of energy, but a longage of expectations. There's so much waste in our system that could be improved, which is why

barring nuclear war or a Carrington event of a solar pulse or something like that, I don't think we're going to collapse. There's going to be a great simplification. And that's why I'm talking to people like you, you in particular, because you're envisioning what a more energy and resource-constrained lifestyle might look like. So let's move on to another category. We talked about kitchenless apartments, maybe a restaurant and the lower level within a city.

We talked about heating and cooling people instead of rooms. But within a city, how could we make our cities more walkable with trolley buses and bikes and just to make transportation less a person in a car by themselves getting around within a city? fundamentally it's it's not rocket science of course you have to get rid of cars and as long as you don't do that you cannot really give the alternatives the space they need so i've seen in many cities that they try to kind of push everything into one street so you have like you have cars you have public transport and you have a cycle pad that is usually on the sidewalk and so instead of taking space away from the car.

A cycle path on the sidewalk? Yes, that's like in Belgium where I'm from. That's very common. So instead of taking away space from the cars, they take away space from the pedestrians and they put the cycle path on the sidewalk, which obviously creates a lot of friction between cyclists and pedestrians,

while the car drivers happily continue. So this is, Belgium always scores very high in like the best cycle cities in the world but i know better i mean it's a very lazy way to try to solve the yeah to okay here you have your cycle pets are you happy now well not really because we are endangering pedestrians at all time especially now with all these fast e-bikes and and scooters who are now going at 40 kilometers per hour next to people walking at 5 km per hour so that's really a very bad idea.

And I see like here in Barcelona it's better. They take away when they put a cycle pad, they take away space from the cars and that's how you have to do it. And people of course complain that's the people who drive cars and who want to keep driving cars. But in general

these cycle pads pretty quickly fill up with cyclists and when I came to live here 15 years ago, nobody was cycling for practical reasons. I mean They went cycling for sports. And now people are cycling everywhere. So it's as simple as that. You just take space away from the cars, give it to the bikes, and people will do the rest.

I actually just got a new e-bike two weeks ago. And I'm going to use it to go into town, which is 10 miles away, with a backpack to get groceries. I'm not going to really use it for exercise. I have another bike for that. But I just think it would be fun to try that. So I'm going to actually try that later today. What else on appropriate lower energy tech would make cities more transportable? You've researched trolley buses, right?

What are those? Yeah. Yeah. So a trolley bus is basically an electric bus, but it has no battery. It is connected to the overhead line. just like a tram or an electric train. And that makes them extremely interesting in the sense that they have... Is that like the cable cars in San Francisco?

I think San Francisco has trolley buses. I don't know, maybe you call them cable cars. They have rubber wheels or is it on rails? I'm not sure. I think they're on rails. Yeah, then it's not a trolley bus. So the great advantage of a trolley bus is that, well, compared to, say, electric buses with batteries, you have all the advantages of electric transportation, so you have more efficient engines, you can power them with renewable energy, you have no exhaust fumes,

but you have none of the disadvantages of using batteries. So batteries take a lot of space. they take a lot of energy to produce, they add a lot of weight to the vehicle, and they cause a peak in the energy demand because the bus is not using energy continuously, but in peaks. So you need to kind of extend your power grid.

And if you kind of compare it to a kind of railed vehicle, like a tram, it's way more cheap, to build you don't have to have the whole rail infrastructure you can build a trolleybus line much quicker it combines much better with cyclists because another problem in my home country Belgium is that when you bike you see people smashing on like falling on the ground everywhere because their bike gets stuck in the tram rails so it is in many ways ideal in-between technology that it's super

efficient and works really well and we had 900 systems beginning of 20th century worldwide How is it without batteries it's powered by how is it powered then? Yeah it's like an electric train

or a tram. It has this kind of pantograph and it's connected to overhead line and so it's constantly fed with electricity by the network. So what are the, I mean, you just listed all the advantages. What are the disadvantages?

Well, that they're associated with poverty and the Soviet Union. Here we are again. This is a viable path then for sustainable sufficiency and efficiency in the future. Totally. Yes. And some cities have on. And some cities have understood that, and that includes very rich cities like Lyon in France. They built, I went to visit that system and document it.

I mean, Lyon is a very chic city, like the buildings are amazing, and people have a lot of money. But it's full of trolleybuses there. Nobody complains about them, on the contrary, because it's a wonderful public transport. medium. But the problem is that the majority of trolley bus systems that are still in working order are in former Soviet Union countries, in Latin American countries. So in basically the rather poor regions of the world. But they used to be anywhere, just that in most Western countries in the 60s and 70s, they were replaced by diesel buses or just by cars. I mean, like public transportation kind of took a dive.

Because we had a lot of diesel and gasoline at that time. Voila. Okay. Moving on to another area of technology, energy, and human benefits. The last two podcasts that have been released with Robert Lustig and this morning with former governor of Oregon, John Kitsaber, we're on human health and our health care system. In the United States, we use 20% of our GDP in the health care.

And we have, our benefits are very low compared to countries like Spain that spend less and have better health care benefits. So from the perspective of of the carbon pulse, how can we get in the future decades 80% of our healthcare benefits with 20% of the resources? Can you speak to that? Have you done research? Do you have suggestions in that direction? Yeah, I did an article on that.

And indeed, I was very much surprised by the environmental footprint of the healthcare system. So it's quite a young research domain. But still, the information that is there is quite revealing. So in the U.S. is like, I think it's 10% of national emissions, the U.S. healthcare system. And I calculated if you would extend that to the whole world, then the total emissions would be 16 gigatons, which is like half of global emissions worldwide. So just imagine that the whole world follows the American example, then that's already half of all emissions we now emit in all sectors of economy. So obviously, that is not sustainable and more so it's counterproductive

because such a big footprint is coming down to curing people at the expense of making other people sick. and other people that's younger generations and future generations who will suffer because of the healthcare we provide now to ourselves. So it's a big moral dilemma. And it's also very difficult, of course, because it's easy to say like for a person like me, like I'm not going to use a heating system and I'm going to wear a sweater and I'm not driving the car.

I'm cycling everywhere. but when it comes to healthcare, it kind of comes down to, well, I'm going to live a shorter life or I'm going to suffer more pain. So it's a very difficult topic to talk about. But there are actually a lot of solutions in the sense that our healthcare system in general and in the US in particular is totally messed up because of the focus on curative medicine. and, well, the fact that it's designed for profit, I mean, it's run by medical companies,

the providers of medical machines, pharmaceuticals, and all other medical products, that actually, yeah, it's them designing our healthcare system. And, yeah, the challenge is to kind of move from a curative healthcare. care to a more preventive healthcare system. That, first of all, does not make people sick, because industrial society has given us a lot of effective medical treatments, but it's also making us sick.

And if you see who is in the hospital, many people are there because of so-called welfare diseases. It's excessive nutrition, low-quality nutrition, lack of movement, stress, substance abuse. There is a lot of reasons why people are in a hospital that should not be in a hospital to begin with. And of course, the medical industry has nothing to win with more focus on preventive medicine because you cannot sell it. There's nothing to sell there.

And if you see the enormous power they have, like the marketing budgets, they have the influence they have over medical scientists. Yeah, then it's pretty obvious why we are here. We are going to the hospital to make the economy grow, but not necessarily to get better. So what are some low-tech responses to that, other than the kitchenless apartments and the communal cooking areas and sharing vacuum cleaners and spending time with other humans

and riding a bike to generate your own, your own electricity. I think many of these things are actually already the solution. So human power, walking, cycling, that is already solving the lack of physical activity. Like, there's now more people in the world who are overweight and underweight. That's kind of quite a change. And the same for like stress and social isolation, which some studies say like being feeling lonely is just as unhealthy as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

There you have your shared kitchens and bathing houses and so on. But there's also a lot to learn from, say, developing countries that do not have access to this modern healthcare system. And India has some great example. So I found a study of the same treatment, which is a cataract surgery. So cataracts are the main core. cause of blindness. And the scientists made a comparison between the energy use and emissions and waste production

between India in the UK. And so in India, they do the same procedure for only 5% of the emissions and the energy use and the waste than they do in the UK. And they manage to get better outcomes. So they have less infection rates than in the UK. And so what are they doing? They are basically kind of flouting every rule of medicine in the first world about infection control. Like they reuse all supplies on different patients.

So one of the main reasons why our healthcare system is such a disaster in environmental terms is because everything is like single use and then dispose of. that includes like you have some anesthetics a bottle and then you use part of that bottle to anesthetize one person and you throw the bottle away that's not what they do in india they keep using the same bottle for different patients they also while they are operating on one patient the next patient is right next to the other patient being prepared for the operation all things that we cannot do in in the u.s or in the u.s or in Europe. But when you read that report, you kind of start wondering, like, why do we have such strict infection rules in the Western world? Is it because of health considerations or is it to make more

money? Because apparently, if they manage to do this with less infections, then what is the use of spending so much waste and energy to do it in a different way? So these are things that show that there is a lot of potential, just like in other sectors, to really lower the footprint of healthcare without reducing health or longevity. Like, we don't need to die at 40 because we do things a bit differently. If you combine that with lifestyle changes, I think we get a long way. we may even arrive at a result where we even live longer than today. So an overarching theme and everything that you've discussed today is I think we can,

those that follow this podcast can cognitively imagine the necessity of some of the things that you're talking about and not only the necessity, but maybe in many cases the desirability of a more local, more communal, more socially, active future. And yet, you and I both know that society in aggregate with politicians and media and everything are not likely to change en masse until we're forced to, like my friend Jocelyn in Lebanon and other places. So for people listening to this show, what sort of recommendations do you have, other than reading your website, reading some of your articles, becoming educated on these things,

how to start a mind shift where you can simplify first and beat the rush, as it were, on starting some of these things? What sort of tips or pathway to making some changes ahead of when this is going to be necessary? Do you have any ideas on that? Yeah, I think it's kind of, would help to imagine you're already living in Lebanon and you kind of prepare for what's coming. Because, and that's a lot of work.

Like even if disaster would strike here tomorrow here in Barcelona, well, I'm not ready either, you know. I have done some things, but I don't produce my own food, for example. So I won't last much longer than other people. And I could not even do it by myself. So it's also cooperating with others. But yes, that's a bit of a kind of, if you look around and everything is working. The power is always on. There's water coming out of the faucet.

There's food in the supermarkets. But it's easy to get to think like, okay, it will always be there. But it's actually, you can argue for sure. it's not always going to be there. We just don't know when it's going to be gone, but it's going to be gone one day, and it may be sooner than you think. So as an individual,

as a family, as a community, I would start preparing for that, and it can actually be a lot of fun, and it's very rewarding to learn things to do them in a different way, and to learn about these low technologies, older technologies, and not just,

technologies, but also just ways of doing things. Like the whole idea of communal household tasks is not really a technological solution. It's just the opposite. It's like more it's social innovation instead of technological innovation. And that is more what we need. After all, we invented everything we need in there's not. I mean, like this electric cooker I was talking about you can consider it a new technology, but there's not any new components involved.

It's just a different mindset using what we have and kind of reconfiguring it into something that fits a world where energy is not always available and not in unlimited quantities. Well, we should continue this series. I think it's really important to share these ideas and your work is unparalleled, I think, in these topics. I have to say that if there were a new apartment building that had communal restaurant

and laundry and maybe a bathhouse or something like that, and there was a poster that said, and Chris Decker lives here, I would sign up to live there as long as they allowed dogs. Looking forward. So if you come back again on the show in six months or so, is there any one topic that you would like to take a really deep dive on that you're personally very interested in and passionate about?

Or is it all of the above? Yeah, well, I'm working on a lot of new articles. So in another six months, I hope there's a five new topic. topics that show up. Can you give us an idea? What are those topics, just one or two sentences? I'm doing one on the steel production, history of steel production, and how to kind of escape from the Iron Age, which is not that easy.

Because lots of so-called sustainable technologies, the high-tech solutions require a lot of steel. I'm also doing some updates on the system here, like the use of solar energy and human power. And then, yeah, I have a whole list. And I have always a couple of dozen articles in preparation. So I never really know which one will be the next that is published. I mean, mostly it takes a few years from start to publishing. So it's hard to predict.

Thank you so much for your continued work. on lower tech, more appropriate tech futures. And to be continued, my friend. Thank you very much. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit thegrat simplification.com for more information on future releases.