Amory Lovins: The frugal cornucopian
Posted by Big Gav in amory lovins, ivan illich, web 2.0
The Economist has an article on Amory Lovins, noting he "began making the case for resource efficiency decades ago, long before it became fashionable", and "now things are going his way" - The Frugal Cornucopian.
IF ANYBODY should be on top of the world today, it is Amory Lovins. That is not just because the energy visionary makes his home on a mountain in Old Snowmass, Colorado. Rather, it is because today’s interrelated energy and climate difficulties have at last made the world see the importance of resource efficiency, energy innovation and holistic design—principles that he has been advocating for nearly four decades.
For much of that time, Mr Lovins, who heads the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a natural-resources consultancy, has been a lonely voice in the wilderness. As far back as the early 1970s, he sounded his first alarm about the potential damage that climate change might bring, but he was ignored. In a paper in Foreign Affairs in 1976, at the height of the energy crises and neuroses of that decade, he argued that what the world needed most was not new energy supplies but more efficiency. He was ruthlessly attacked by the energy industry and the political establishment, and his proposal for an alternative “soft path” out of the energy crisis was dismissed. Energy and economic growth always grew in lockstep, went the conventional argument, and to think otherwise was dangerously naive.
But history has proved him right. Thanks to a combination of high prices and public policies aimed at encouraging efficiency and conservation, America’s energy use did decouple from economic output in the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s. Crucially, this happened without impoverishing the country, proving his once-controversial thesis that growth and greenery can indeed go hand in hand. That experience, along with the recent global energy-price shock, has made it respectable for business and political leaders to talk about energy efficiency.
Mr Lovins should be pleased, but his satisfaction at having been proved right is tempered by lingering unease that there are echoes of the 1980s in today’s debate. The main problem with the approach to energy in the 1970s, he argues, was that the issue was defined as a supply shortage. “The question they asked was how to get more energy, at any price, instead of asking: ‘How should we use energy, why are we using it so wastefully, and what do people really use energy for?’” he says.
That question points to one of his main contributions to the energy debate. He insists that the goal of public policy should be to ensure adequate and affordable supplies not of energy per se but of “energy services”—as he loves to put it, the cold beer and hot showers made possible by energy. By redefining the problem that way, rather than merely subsidising more power plants or oil drilling, public policy can be made technology neutral, and consumer needs can be satisfied by demand-side measures if they prove cheaper than drilling or digging for new supply. ...
Mr Lovins is convinced that the “intensity and diversity of innovation attempts today is much greater than in the 1980s.” One reason is that technology, be it in nanotech, batteries or computing, has improved. Another is that research itself is much more productive, in his view, thanks to the rise of open, networked and global approaches to innovation.
He sees one more reason for optimism about today’s innovation boom. Unlike the last clean-tech wave, which was largely funded by government money doled out to politically connected groups, this wave is a largely “invisible” trend funded chiefly by private money coming from venture capitalists, angel investors and private-equity funds. That, he reckons, makes for more discerning investments and increases the odds of success.
Unlike many environmentalists, Mr Lovins has always had a respect for market forces and entrepreneurship. Markets are good at weeding out trendy but impractical technologies, for one thing. And he designed RMI to be not only a think-tank but a “do tank” that puts theory into practice. To do so, he has taken various of his ideas and formed start-up companies that have then been spun out of RMI.
Among these are Hypercar (which came up with a new design for a light, efficient car), Fiberforge (an offshoot of Hypercar which sells carbon-fibre parts to automotive suppliers) and Bright Automotive (which is developing technologies for plug-in hybrid cars, and is expected to be floated within a year). It has been nearly two decades coming, but the world’s car industry is now embracing plug-ins, fuel cells, electric cars and lightweight bodies.
It is not just his enthusiasm for market forces that makes Mr Lovins, a man whose green credentials are impeccable, a most unlikely eco-warrior. He does not mind taking an infinitely long shower, he explains, if he uses renewable energy to heat his shower and recycles his waste water. Though it is fashionable to proclaim that sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) are the work of the devil, he made a point of designing his initial Hypercar as an SUV to show that the proper target for green ire was bad design, an inefficient engine and dirty fuel—not the SUV per se. He even rankles when he is called an environmentalist, insisting that he prefers “elegant frugality to wearing a hair shirt.”
I'm not sure where I came across this, but Lovins also features in this lengthy interview with "Mother Earth News" back in 1977 - The Plowboy Interview.
PLOWBOY: Amory, for the benefit of those who don't know you, could you explain how you got into the field of energy analysis? How did a physicist happen to get so deeply involved in energy policy?
LOVINS: Through a series of historic accidents. It's true that I'm basically an experimental physicist, or at least I used to be. I was working toward a Ph.D. in physics at Oxford, in England, during the late sixties. Up until that time, I had been raised to be a normal, healthy techno-twit I didn't much care about environmental issues.
Gradually, though, I began reading about the wider problems in the world. And I started to realize that it wouldn't make a heck of a lot of difference to anybody whether or not I solved the problems I was working on in the laboratory. At the same time, I was becoming less and less able to see myself twenty years down the road as an academic physicist.
At about that time—which is to say, the very late sixties—I developed an interest in a wild part of northwest Wales called Snowdonia National Park. A colleague and I had done a lot of mountain photography there, and a little writing, too. We thought we might be able to recover some of our film costs by selling an article to National Geographic so we wrote to the magazine. And they said, "Well this is nice stuff, but it's not what we publish - it's too atmospheric. But you might send it to Dave Brower at Friends of the Earth, because Dave likes that sort of thing. He might have some suggestions." So we wrote to Dave, and very much to our surprise we soon found ourselves signed up to do one of Dave's "exhibit format" books for FOE.
PLOWBOY: This was in 1970?
LOVINS: Right, late 1970. In the process of doing the book, during the spring of '71, co-photographer Philip Evans and I became very much involved with Dave Brower and the things he was doing. Also, I was getting to be sufficiently disenchanted with academic science at that point that I was willing to jump off and try something else ... so in May of 1971 I resigned my Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford, moved from Oxford to London, and went to work for Friends of the Earth as their British representative, which involved me in a mixture of analysis, writing, speaking, broadcasting, testifying, and lobbying at all levels, from grassroots to Prime Ministerial. ...
PLOWBOY: All right. You've written three energy books in the past several years-six Friends of the Earth books altogether—and you've had numerous articles and papers published in technical journals. But by far your most celebrated piece of work—the one for which you are best known today—is an essay entitled "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" which appeared in the October '76 issue of Foreign Affairs. Since many of MOTHER's readers haven't seen that piece, I wonder if you could explainbriefly—what it was about, and why that article has been so controversial.the rate at which a society gobbles energy isn't so much a measure of that society's success or well-being any more, but rather of its failure.
LOVINS: I'll try. Basically, the essay outlines and contrasts two paths along which U.S. energy policies—or the energy policies of other countries—might evolve over the next fifty years or so. These paths are not forecasts or projections - rather, they're illustrations. They're not necessarily what will or should happen - they're a way of visualizing what might happen.
What I said in "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" is that most of the energy futures one can imagine are basically variations on one or another of two themes. The first theme—which I call a "hard" energy path—assumes that the energy problem facing this country is how to expand supplies-especially domestic supplies-of energy to meet extrapolated demands. According to hard-path advocates, the solution to this problem is to deplete all sorts of depletable fuels faster, whether it's oil, gas, coal, or uranium - to convert those fuels into premium forms of energy, mainly electricity - to do that conversion in ever larger, more complex, more centralized, hightechnology plants - then to distribute the energy through big, centralized distribution networks. ...
LOVINS: With a soft energy path based on three components ... components that—when you put them together—form a whole greater than the sum of the parts. The three components are—first—very greatly increased efficiency in energy use ... second, the rapid introduction of what I call "soft technologies", which I'll define in a minute ... and third, the transitional use of fossil fuels to buy the time needed to deploy the soft technologies.
I don't need to say too much about the first component, except that I'm talking not just about increasing the gas mileage of cars or the efficiency of electric toasters ... I'm talking about reducing the enormous losses that occur when you convert primary energy—in the form of coal, petroleum, and so on—into gasoline and electricity. The losses that occur in converting primary energy to end—use energy have been increasing dramatically over the past few decades, and if we do nothing about it these losses will go on increasing until they take up over half of all future energy growth.
PLOWBOY: In other words, one of the biggest energy wasters in our present society is our own energy industry!
LOVINS: Precisely. In Britain, for example, the energy industries are the largest energy consumers. In England, more than half the growth in energy production that's occurred since 1900 has gone to fuel the fuel industries.
PLOWBOY: Wow!
LOVINS: Now obviously, this kind of thing can't be allowed to go on. We can't continue to fuel the fuel industry at an ever-increasing rate, and the rest of society can't continue to consume energy at an ever-increasing rate. It has to end somewhere.
PLOWBOY: I take it, then, you feel that zero or negative growth in the rate of energy use in the U.S. is a desirable and achievable goal.
LOVINS: Absolutely. And of course, that means we're going to have to learn how to do more with less. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we'll have to give up a lot of things that are dear to us. I hear that fear expressed quite often. Some people feel that civilization in the U.S. would be inconceivable if we used only, say, half as much electricity as we do now . . . and yet that is what we did use in 1963, when Americans were at least half as civilized as they are at present.
PLOWBOY: OK. A minute ago, you promised to define the term "soft technologies".
LOVINS: Right. Soft technologies have five defining characteristics. Number one, they're diverse ... that is, we're talking about a large number of individual technologies, each doing what it does best, and none trying to be a panacea. Second, soft technologies rely on renewable energy flows - sunlight, wind, vegetation, and the like — rather than on depletable fuels.
PLOWBOY: They rely on energy that's always going to be there whether we use it or not.
LOVINS: Yes. Third, they are relatively understandable, or what Ivan Illich would call convivial. That is, although an ordinary person wouldn't necessarily be able to build a particular soft energy device or have a detailed knowledge of what goes on inside it, he or she would be able to control it. It wouldn't be some mysterious giant lurking over the horizon, but rather an item of everyday activity that would be relatively understandable. My pocket calculator, for example, is technically a very sophisticated device, but I run it - it doesn't run me. That's the sort of social criterion I had in mind.
All right. The fourth and fifth defining characteristics of soft technologies are that they're matched in scale and in energy quality to end-use needs.
I'd never heard of "Ivan Illich" before and was wondering if he'd gotten "Vladimir Illich" mixed up (Lenin's first names) - but a quick Google set me straight - Mr Illich was an Austrian anarchist of sorts who Wikipedia describes as the "intellectual father of Web 2.0 and Wikipedia".
Ivan Illich (Vienna, 4 September 1926 – Bremen, 2 December 2002) was an Austrian philosopher and anarchist social critic. He authored a series of critiques of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects of the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, and economic development. Illich has been called the intellectual father of Web 2.0 and Wikipedia. In 1971 Illich imagined a world where people learned mostly from each other rather than from experts and where information would be available everywhere anytime—in railway stations, factories, cafes, hospitals everywhere.
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