Amory Lovins

Lovins v. Richter

Energy guru Amory Lovins and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Burton Richter face off, mano a mano, debating the merits of nuclear energy for addressing the climate crisis. MongaBay offers a blow-by-blow account. No one will be shocked to hear that I would call the bout for Lovins, though it was far from a TKO.

Indirect greenhouse-gas savings

(Part of the No Sweat Solutions series.)

Previously I pointed out that efficiency, doing more with less, is a key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. (A lot of people on Gristmill are fans of conservation, doing less with less. I have nothing against this, so long as it is a voluntary choice, but I won't be spending a lot of time on it.)

Normally, when people think of efficiency they think of direct savings -- insulating homes, electric cars, and so on. That is: make the same sort of goods we make now, but more cleverly, so they require fewer inputs to operate. And that is an extremely important kind of efficiency.

But Amory Lovins and Wolfgang Feist pointed out long ago that there is another kind of efficiency. Instead of looking at how to provide the same goods, look at what those goods do for us, and see if there is another way to provide the same service. For example, it remains essential to start making steel, cement, and mill timber more efficiently.

CSM investigates

Mark Clayton at the Christian Science Monitor looks into it. This describes my position quite well: But for those energy experts who have done life-cycle analysis of nuclear power, the big concern is that policymakers may be misled into believing that just because nuclear CO2 emissions are low, the cost of nuclear as an option […]

It’s all about inequality

Blogging about the new Elizabeth Kolbert article in the New Yorker, David writes:

But then, there's the nagging thought. Lovins can always talk and explain and persuade better than we can -- he's a friggin' genius -- but the intuitive question keeps returning: if there were so many errors, and so much benefit to be gained by correcting them, and it's all so easy ... why isn't it happening? Something doesn't fit.

Roberts quotes Kolbert expressing similar thoughts:

Lovins's promise that apparently intractable problems -- oil dependence, global warming, nuclear proliferation -- can be profitably resolved is both the great appeal of his approach and its biggest liability. Much of what he recommends sounds just too good to be true, the econometric version of "Shed pounds by eating chocolate!"

This is a good question, and one of my early posts on this blog partially answered it. Energy demand has low long-term price elasticity (PDF). (That's economic jargon for, "people tend to overlook a lot of profitable opportunities to save energy.") That, in turn, implies that Amory Lovins has spotted something real. We have overlooked, over a period of decades, profitable opportunities at market prices -- opportunities that were profitable even without carbon taxes or emissions caps. "Market failure" is not a strong enough term for a system that could consistently go so wrong.

And does it well

The New Yorker has a great profile of Amory Lovins written by journalist, book author, and interviewee Elizabeth Kolbert. (It’s not online — check last week’s issue.) It’s a fantastic piece, really capturing Lovins’ entrepreneurial drive not just to do research and develop strategies but to evangelize for his perspective. He’s tireless trying to get […]

Warning: techno-engineering speak ahead

Amory Lovins is rightfully admired by environmentalists. But nobody is right all the time, and the hydrogen path is one of his few mistakes. He summarizes his argument for hydrogen in Twenty Hydrogen Myths (PDF). More extensive discussion is embedded in his book Winning the Oil Endgame (book-length PDF).

His basic proposal:

Let’s not fetishize size

Many environmentalists are reverse size queens -- "small is beautiful."

When Schumacher wrote the book of that title, he was responding to a real tendency to ignore diseconomies of scale -- a tendency that still exists. Up to a certain point, both organizations and physical plants produce more output for each unit of input as they grown in size. Past that point, costs of gigantism kick in, and efficiency begins to fall instead of rising.

But Schumacher assumed that this point always occurs at small or medium sizes. In fact, there are many cases in which you get economies of scale up to very large sizes indeed.

For example, computer CPUs are still made in giant factories, not neighborhood plants; your computer would cost a whole lot more if that were not the case.

Damn he’s smart

The Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins appeared on PBS's Charlie Rose Show on Tuesday. He was, as usual, brilliant and absurdly quotable. The guy's a human pull-quote generator. Charlie Rose is kind of dippy though. Here's the full video:

And I’m checking it. Twice.

People like to number things. They like to make lists. But I'm always impressed by the seeming randomness with which organizations decide to publish decisive lists. Why choose Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006 to publish your top 100 green campaigners of all time? Why not?!

Not quite at the end of the year and a little late for the turn of the millennium, the U.K. Environment Agency released their "Earthshakers" list today, just in time for ... well, I'm sure it's in time for something.