[ashtonkem]

You do have to wonder if they’re confused on why this isn’t persuasive to normal people. Go cook outside on a rocket stove[0] and washing clothes by hand every day? Come on.

Meanwhile the thing that has actually gotten people out of their cars is the ebike. It turns out it’s much more effective to produce a more convenient and comfortable solution for people rather than just demand that they go back a century or two just because.

0 - It’s also telling that such advocates never seem to actually say who should be stuck doing all the labor that machines like washing machines now do for us. Washing clothes and dishes by hand is hard labor, and someone is going to have to give up their career or free time to do it if we’re going to ban these machines. No extra credit if you figure out who will get stuck with the task…

[Karrot_Kream]

> 0 - It’s also telling that such advocates never seem to actually say who should be stuck doing all the labor that machines like washing machines now do for us. Washing clothes and dishes by hand is hard labor, and someone is going to have to give up their career or free time to do it if we’re going to ban these machines. No extra credit if you figure out who will get stuck with the task…

Yeah lol I always find this the funniest part of Low Tech Magazine. While they're always breathlessly moralizing, they rarely think through (or at least write about) the social ramifications of the changes they propose. They do have some interesting ideas though, such as the use of thermal cookers, and burning biomass in a rocket stove may not be the worst idea if you live in an area with a temperate climate and a dirty grid. Perhaps more practical though would be just incentivizing ordering at a restaurant, since a restaurant will be more energy efficient at preparing food than an individual will.

[bluGill]

> since a restaurant will be more energy efficient at preparing food than an individual

Really? Most restaurants have a grill and deep fry vats hot 100% of the time even when nobody is there.

[ip26]

never seem to actually say who should be stuck doing all the labor

They are probably not actually closet misogynists or anything like that, they probably just haven’t thought that far ahead.

[ashtonkem]

> They are probably not actually closet misogynists or anything like that, they probably just haven’t thought that far ahead.

I agree, this is more probable than the closet misogyny theory. But it's still not exactly a ringing endorsement to say "whoops, we didn't think about who would have to do all that labor once we took away all those labor saving devices!" It's not like this is some hard to predict third order effect, after all.

Overall, the whole argument they're making is kind of silly. Washing clothes by hand sucks, people rushed to buy machines to replace this labor for a damned good reason. If someone's plan for the future involves persuading people to go back to doing labor the vast majority of people don't want to do, then they should prepared for a lot of failure. Given the continued sales of brand new washing machines at my local home improvement store, I would argue that they have failed thus far.

(Ironically, there is probably a good lower-tech argument in making labor saving devices simpler and more reliable. The short lifespan of our appliances is both deeply unpopular and environmentally problematic, and doing anything to make them more repairable would both be good for the environment and incredibly popular.)

Back to their original argument, there's a reason why I hold up the e-bike as an unqualified success that the authors here are incorrectly ignoring. Cycling enthusiasts--myself included--have argued for decades that biking is better and people should switch over to using bikes for more trips. Repeated appeals to the environment, the wallet, and ones health haven't really moved the needle much in this area. Yet it's the high-tech (gasp!) e-bike that appears to be finally getting commuters out of cars and into the saddle. It turns out that while moralizing is fun, actual change involves making compromises towards the convenience and comfort of your average person.

[ip26]

Yup, I'm with you, lowtechmag has a lot of articles that seem unmoored from reality. There's always a few good ones though. There's one arguing if the grid was designed for 98-99.9% uptime instead of 99.999999% uptime, we'd a) survive just fine b) have cheaper power and c) be more resilient against power failure when it inevitably happens, which I found pretty thought provoking.

[Gibbon1]

The rocket stove reminds me. I've seen lots of stuff on low tech 'improved' cook stoves for people in developing countries. I think women in those countries would be happier served with a pressure cooker and a two burner induction stove running off solar panels. All horrible high tech, but actually cheap commodities in practice.

[Karrot_Kream]

An induction hob with a single ring/burner takes anywhere from 1.3-1.8 kWh of energy. It's almost impossible for the type of person that would benefit from a rocket stove to have access to a solar setup which could generate that much energy. Moreover, most of the time these families/individuals are impoverished enough and/or live in places with bad enough infrastructure that even gas for a gas stove isn't available. In these situations, biomass rocket stoves make the most sense.

(Cooking actually takes quite a bit of energy unfortunately and is probably one of the hardest human activities to make carbon neutral. Luckily there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to tackle first before the question of cooking efficiency comes up.)

[ashtonkem]

My fairly large solar setup provides a max of about 6.5kW under ideal circumstances (which isn't always when we need to cook, FWIW), but it's far far beyond what a typical woman in developing Africa could afford.

[Gibbon1]

Run the numbers. 400-500W of solar provides enough energy per day. Two 150ah batteries can handle the peak load.

[zo1]

I live in, arguably a good part of Africa, and even here it would be a stretch. Infrastructure and "throw money at the problem" type solutions don't work great in rural areas even if you have local communities buy in and assistance.

You're better off just giving poor people here free electricity, which a lot of places do.

[ClumsyPilot]

In these places thats a lot of money, and have much, much higher priority items for such investment

[adrianN]

If I were someone who would benefit from a rocket stove, I'd likely sell the six solar panels and the induction stove and use the fantastical amounts of money I make that way to pay for my children to get an education.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> Meanwhile the thing that has actually gotten people out of their cars is the ebike.

This is not my experience. People just put their ebike on a rack and drive it somewhere to ride it for fun.

[ashtonkem]

And this is why it's useful to check the literature, individual results might provide misleading anecdotes.

> This paper reports on a review of the European literature about the impacts of having an electrically-assisted bike available to use, together with results from a trial in the UK city of Brighton, where 80 employees were loaned an electrically-assisted bike for a 6–8 week period. In the Brighton trial, three-quarters of those who were loaned an e-bike used them at least once a week. Across the sample as a whole, average usage was in the order of 15–20 miles per week, and was accompanied by an overall reduction in car mileage of 20%. At the end of the trial, 38% participants expected to cycle more in the future, and at least 70% said that they would like to have an e-bike available for use in the future, and would cycle more if this was the case. This is consistent with the results of the European literature which shows that when e-bikes are made available, they get used; that a proportion of e-bike trips typically substitutes for car use; and that many people who take part in trials become interested in future e-bike use, or cycling more generally.

The real key is that e-bike users will ride further, which expands the range of trips that the owners will consider via bike.

> John MacArthur was the lead author of the NITC report, and told the Electric Bike Report, “While many of the rides we surveyed were for recreation, on average we found that the average trip on an e-bike was nine miles,” adding, “historically on traditional bicycles we see a trip of more than five miles being a barrier.”

> Additionally, the electric assist of the e-bike helps to generate more trips, longer trips and different types of bicycle trips. These findings are represented by the high value attributed to being able to avoid or tackle hills easier, ride farther and faster with less effort, and being able to carry more cargo or children when needed.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Another big factor might be that I live in the US. Generally speaking, everything you want to go to is a lot farther away here.

[ashtonkem]

Given the rapid urbanization of America, that will not be true for long.

Assuming that the 9 mile limit holds, that is a pretty long distance in most cities. I live in the suburban edge of a small city, and downtown is only 6.4 miles away for me. Even when I lived in LA, 9 miles was more than enough for 80% of my trips or so.