Amory Lovins - Rocky Mountain Institute researcher - Interview

Progressive, The, May, 1995 by David Kupfer

His name connotes a genre, a school of thought, an entire outlook on energy efficiency, conservation, and the use of renewable resources. Amory Lovins, forty-seven, directs research at Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit resource policy center in Colorado, which he and his wife, Hunter, founded thirteen years ago. Its mission is to foster the efficient and sustainable use of resources as a path to global security.

Trained as a physicist, Lovins has published twenty-two books and hundreds of technical and popular papers, and consulted for scores of utilities, governments, and industries worldwide. A self-avowed "techno twit," in 1993 he was granted a genius award from the MacArthur Foundation. Lovins's wit and humor give him a remarkable ability to grasp problems, see creative solutions, and bring about institutional change. He traverses the globe in his mission to bring resource-efficiency reason into the energy-pohliy world.

The conservationist David Brower encouraged Lovins not to finish his studies at Oxford nearly twenty-five years ago. He had better things to do, says Brower, who enlisted Lovins in a stunningly successful wilderness-conservation effort. Lovins took photos, conducted research, and wrote text for a large coffee-table book about the plans of the world's biggest mining company, RTZ, to strip-mine copper in Snowdonia National Park, or as it's locally called, Eryri, in North Wales. The mining company went away mad but better off, since the copper market crashed soon thereafter.

"Amory set a standard by inventing the soft energy path, which challenged everything," says Brower. "He said America had too much energy, that the hydro-nuclear-coal-electric grid was silly, often unnecessary, heavily subsidized by taxpayers, dangerous, and uneconomical, that the peaceful atom was a myth masking a bloated war machine. This shook some of us, but Amory had the figures to back himself up. He always does."

Seemingly indefatigable, Lovins continues to lecture widely. I spoke with him during a 1994 visit to San Francisco.

Q: How is the health of Rocky Mountain Institute?

Lovins: RMI is rich in accomplishments and potential, even though financially we're still nomadic hunter-gatherers. In 1982, my wife and colleague, Hunter, and I wanted to gather together a handful of colleagues so that we could work more effectively than by ourselves. The handful got a bit out of hand. We now have a staff of forty in Old Snowmass, plus another thirty in a Boulder subsidiary called E SOURCE, the leading source of technical information about advanced electric efficiency. After thirteen years, the Institute has ripened into an important source of innovation, working on the connections among energy, transportation, water, agriculture, local economic development, green real-estate projects, and global security. We found that by combining advanced technology, creative use of market forces, aikido politics, and Jeffersonian community organizing, we can solve many problems at once without making new ones, and can usually protect the environment not at a cost but at a profit.

Q: With your local economic-development program, have you discovered many good working examples of sustainable bottom-up strategies?

Lovins: Yes-hundreds of them. Let's take just one. Osage, Iowa, population 3,800, had a municipal utility which for about a dozen years helped people to save energy in simple ways. As a result, the utility was able to prepay all its debt, build up a healthy surplus for emergencies, and cut the rates five times in five years (in fact, they went down by one-third excluding inflation, to only half the state average). That in turn attracted two big factories to town and kept the existing ones competitive in global markets: the sock-knitting mill even tripled its number of employees.

Most importantly, the energy savings then kept in town more than $1,000 per household per year--money that had previously gone out of town and out of state to buy utility inputs, but is now sticking around Main Street, supporting local jobs and multipliers, and making Osage noticeably more prosperous than comparable towns nearby.

Q: So RMI is actively working to promote the notion that regional sustainable bottom-up economic development is possible and practical?

Lovins: Yes. RMI's Economic Renewal Project has developed a series of workbooks and casebooks that citizen task forces can use on their own. Within weeks of our training people in Kentucky, some of them had the process up and running in their own communities with no further help from us. That is just what we wanted to achieve. It's effectively a dehydrated instant development kit--just add activist and stir.

Q: What is the status of our progress down the "soft energy path"--the use of efficiency and renewable energy?

Lovins: We've already cut the energy bill in the United States by about $160 billion a year. But we're still wasting over $300-billion-a-year worth of energy. We've hardly scratched the surface of how much efficiency or renewable supply is available or worth buying. So we've made dramatic progress. But far from exhausting the cheapest opportunities, we've built up an ever-bigger backlog of untapped ways to get better services with less energy and less money.