Amory Lovins

Forest and Bird, Volume 21, Issue 3, 1 August 1990, Page 40

Amory Lovins

by.

James R Udall

Walking the Soft Path

ITTING IN THE BACK of an auditorium, waiting to address a global-warming conference at the University of Colorado, Amory Lovins glances towards the ceiling and frowns. The man Newsweek once called "one of the Western world’s most influential energy thinkers" has detected yet another wasteful indoor-lighting system. Lovins pulls a calculator from his breast pocket and begins punching numbers. Soon he has computed how many kilowatts are being squandered, how many pounds of greenhouse gases are being spewed into the atmosphere to produce that power, how many thousands of dollars a lighting retrofit could save.

Modern Prometheus

At the lectern, Lovins extracts an efficient light bulb from his briefcase and plugs it in. Like a modern Prometheus, he raises the bulb and launches into his speech. He tells his audience that the United States could run its economy on a third to a fourth as much energy as it does today, saving $300 billion annually while reducing urban smog, acid rain, and global warming. By making cost-effective efficiency investments, he says, the country could eliminate oil imports and save trillions of dollars by the year 2000 — enough to pay off the national debt. This is easily the conference's most uplifting message yet, and the crowd — nearly pickled by doom and gloom — perks up as Lovins, his moustache and thick eyeglasses giving him a vague resemblance to Charlie Chaplin, continues his speech. "Together, renewable energy and energy efficiency — in the form of light bulbs like these, high-mileage cars, superinsulated homes, smart electric-motor systems, advanced aircraft, high-efficency appliances, and a host of other such technologies — make it possible to meet all our energy needs without harming the climate." Reeling off facts, figures, and asides ("In some cases efficiency is better than a free lunch; it’s a lunch your'e paid to eat’), Lovins keeps the audience hanging on his every word. He concludes by gently chiding the university: "It’s theoretically possible to save 92 percent of all the electricity used for lighting — and this auditorium would be a good place to start." Applause, laughter. As Lovins leaves the room, small clusters of people form to discuss his speech. Two questions hang in the air: Who is this guy? And, is his good news too good to be true? Environmental patriarch David Brower first met Amory Lovins in 1970, after Lovins mailed him a manuscript he had written about Snowdonia National Park, Britain's second largest. Brower found the manuscript riveting, both as an ode to Snowdonia and as a jeremiad against its exploitation. "Imagining it to be the work of someone middle-aged, I was astonished to discover that Amory was only 21," he recalls.

Questioned Conventional Wisdom

Dropping out of school to take a job with Brower's organisation Friends of the Earth, Lovins expanded his studies of the energy problem. Trained as a scientist, he was comfortable, as few environmentalists are, with

the topic’s arcane jargon; perhaps more important, he had both the courage to question the conventional wisdom and Brower goading him on. "My experiences in Snowdonia taught me that minerals and fossil fuels must be wrested from the earth with great violence; that their extraction, transportation, and usage all entail environmental costs,’’ says Lovins. "But having been trained as a physicist, my initial assumption was that the best replacements for oil and gas would be the nuclear technologies." Reading voraciously, attending seminars, playing what-if on his slide rule, Lovins discovered that nuclear power "made much less sense than I had presumed." Turning his back on such "hard" technologies, he began developing the case of an alternative energy future he called the "soft path." Soon Lovins was giving the seminars himself. "Where most of us use 10 percent of our brainpower, Amory uses 90,’ Brower says. "He is extraordinarily dedicated. He's insightful, intuitive, great with numbers. He sees the linkages better than almost anybody. He's an absolute genius." In the early 70s it was universally believed that a nation’s energy consumption was the yardstick of its economic performance — hence US consumption was expected to double every 20 or 30 years. Then came the 1973 oil shock. The energy crisis was born. It was against this backdrop that Lovins published the book that brought him to prominence, Soft Energy Paths. "According to conventional wisdom," he wrote, "the energy problem is how to increase energy supplies to meet projected demands. The [proposed] solution to this problem is familiar: Ever more remote and fragile places are to be ransacked, at ever greater risk and cost." Lovins argued that a better answer was to wring more work from our energy. "We understand too little the wise use of power," he wrote. We're like somebody who can’t keep the bathtub full because the water keeps running out. Before we buy a bigger water heater, we ought to get a plug."

Seminal Impact

By outlining a scenario in which the nuclearpower genie is rebottled, and oil, gas, and coal are replaced by hydropower, biomass, solar, and other sustainable-energy supplies, Lovins forever changed the context of the energy debate. Because of its seminal impact, Soft Energy Paths, which has been translated into eight languages, has been compared to Silent Spring. The book touched off a firestorm of debate. Energy insiders vilified Lovins as a gadfly, a pie-in-the-sky dreamer, a dangerous ecofreak, a purveyor of naked nonsense, and Public Enemy Number One. Supremely, even arrogantly confident, Lovins did not mind being cast as the energy priesthood’s Martin Luther. "All knowledge starts as heresy,’ he told his critics. With "energy independence" as its slogan during the late 1970s, the US government was striding down the hard path. Billions were lavished on experimental technologies — synfuels, the breeder reactor, coal gasification. But as energy prices rose, Americans began buying gas-sipping cars, insulating

attics, draught proofing windows. As the consumers opted for the soft path, energy shortages were transformed into gluts, and hard-path initiatives succumbed to market forces. From 1973 to 1986, US energy usage levelled off even as the-gross national product grew by 35 percent — an historic accomplishment. Lovin’s energy-efficiency revolution, once derided as visionary, was coming to pass. Events were proving the heretic right. In 1982, Amory and his wife, Hunter Lovins, a lawyer and political scientist who helped start the urban-forestry group TreePeople, established Rocky Mountain Institute. A nonprofit research and educational foundation, RMI works to "foster the efficient and sustainable use of resources as a path to global security." Half the institute's $1 million annual budget comes from providing state-of-the-art information on efficiency to energy companies, utilities, and government agencies in more than 20 countries. The institute is housed in a building the Lovinses designed to be a model of resource efficiency. Curvilinear stone walls, reminiscent of an Anasazi cliff dwelling, flank a greenhouse (complete with iguana and banana tree) that supplies virtually all of the building’s heat. Everywhere is evidence of Amory’s fondness for ingenious gadgetry. Flushing the Swedish toilets requires a mere gallon of water, the shower uses water-sav-ing technology first developed for submarines, and the refrigerator is six times as efficient as the best commercial model. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases overflow with one of the world’s most comprehensive energy libraries, a note on the photocopier says that operating it doubles the building's electrical use, and the table around which the RMI staff (earnest, bluejeaned, thirtyish) gather for lunch is covered with publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the Utne Reader.

Frenetic Schedule

Lovins is the key synapse in a global network of energy experts, and he maintains a frenetic schedule, travelling hundreds of thousands of miles a year. In truth Lovins is a driven man. He does not vacation. According to RMI staffers, Lovins is motivated by the intellectual’s quest for truth, the ecologist’s reverence for linkages, and the economist's affection for efficiency. What irks him most is the careless, unthinking way so much energy is squandered. And yet he is no puritan. "I’m not interested in doing with less," he says. "But in doing more with less. We don’t have to become vegetarians and ride bicycles to save the Earth." Though they care deeply about the environment, the Lovinses are careful not to bill themselves as environmentalists. "It’s an ambiguous term that means different things to different people,’’ says Amory. "We generally find it more effective to frame our arguments in economic terms." Nonetheless, RMI routinely intercedes in environmental disputes involving energy. For example, in 1985 Lovins was asked by the Conservation Law Foundation of New England to analyze the energy needs of a paper company that wanted to build a controversial hydroelectric dam on Maine's Penobscot

River. Lovins discovered that improving elec-tric-motor systems at the company’s pulp mills would free up more energy than the dam could produce, at one-eighth the cost. By demonstrating that a cost-effective, practical, and environmentally benign alternative was available, Lovins played an important role in the eventual cancellation of the dam. Two years later, Lovins critiqued a Department of the Interior report recommending that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be leased for oil drilling. Never one to mince words, he concluded that the department, which had failed even to mention efficiency and the role it might play in meeting the nation’s energy needs, "should not shame its traditions, and expose its honest analysts to ridicule, by proceeding with this mendacious draft. It needs to be done over." Although Interior’s report was never rewritten, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups have used Lovins’ arguments as ammunition in their so-far-successful fight to prevent development of the refuge. More recently, Lovins funded and helped direct an exhaustive study by RMI associates Bill Keepin and Gregory Kats that refutes the contention, fashionable among some edi-torial-page writers, that increasing our use of nuclear power is the best way to abate global warming. In fact, they found, improving electrical efficiency is nearly seven times more cost-effective than nuclear power for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Efficiency and national security are the Lovinses’ bread and butter, but RMI is also active in water, agriculture and economicrenewal issues. Last March an RMI report concluded that an efficiency program could save Denver residents as much water as the proposed Two Forks Dam could provide, at one-fifth the cost. Two weeks later, Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly announced that he would scuttle Two Forks. Although Lovins does not claim credit for sin-gle-handedly nixing the dam, he does believe that the RMI report had some bearing on Reilly's decision. The Denver Water Board subsequently adopted an aggressive waterconservation program along the lines suggested by Lovins and his environmentalist allies.

Prophet Without Honour

Lovins now commands $6,000 a day as a consultant and recently won a $100,000 prize from the Onassis Foundation, but he was something of a prophet without honour during the Reagan years. (No nation ever conserved itself to greatness," said the president). The irony is that Lovins’ ideas have found a very receptive audience among many foreign leaders, including Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, several of whose top advisers maintain a relationship with Rocky Mountain Institute. One, Yevgeni Velikhov, was instrumental in the production of a 45-minute television film, The Energy Efficiency Revolution — A Key to Perestroika, which has been aired in the Soviet Union four times. Lovins and Velikhov are now collaborating on a book and have plans to build an international youth camp in Soviet Georgia that will be solar-heated and energy efficient. Meanwhile, a number of recent developments have given Lovins’ message new currency. By 1988 the US energy bill grew to

$500 billion, with domestic oil extraction dropping and oil imports soaring. As OPEC regains its ability to put the screws on the West, some experts predict another oil crisis. At 17 million barrels a day, Americans are now burning as much oil as the Exxon Valdez spilled — every 20 minutes. For years the public has confused efficiency with conservation, with Jimmy Carter in a sweater, with "freezing in the dark." But efficiency does not mean curtailment or sacrifice. "Drilling for oil in our inefficient cars and buildings isn’t instant or free," Lovins says. "But it’s faster and much cheaper than drilling anywhere else." It’s also much better for the environment. Efficiency improvements not only reduce acid rain and urban smog, they are essential in the effort to stabilize Earth’s climate — a goal that Climatologist Stephen Schneider of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research believes will require cutting fossil-fuel consumption by half. "The conventional wisdom says that achieving such reductions will require draconian sacrifice," says Lovins, ever the heretic. "However, cutting carbon dioxide emissions through energy efficiency will save money and improve the quality of life here and abroad." To this end, RMI has recently begun an international outreach program to use less electricity in China, India and the Soviet Union. As more politicians begin to understand that a sound energy policy would cause many other issues to fall into place, efficiency has gained powerful new allies. Lovins’ intellectual fingerprints are all over the globalwarming bills introduced by Senator Wirth and Representative Claudine Schneider (R-R.I). Even President Bush’s otherwiseflawed clean-air proposal acknowledges that energy efficiency can help control acid rain. Yet despite efficiency’s abundant promise, it may take another crisis before the federal government adopts it as a national goal. "History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives," Lovins says, quoting Israeli politician Abba Eban. "We've worked our way well down the list, but we may not be at the bottom yet." Regardless of what happens, Amory Lovins will continue as a torchbearer for efficiency. A man with a mission, he has a consuming desire to discover elegant solutions to vexing problems, large and small. #& James R Udall, is a freelance writer from Carbondale, Colorado. This article is reproduced with the kind permission of Sierra magazine.