Grist talks to Lovins
If politicians think in sound bites and intellectuals think in sentences, Amory Lovins thinks in white papers. His speech is studded with pregnant pauses — you can almost hear the whirs and clicks as an enormous mass of statistics, analyses, and aphorisms is trimmed and edited into a manageable length. I’ve talked to experts who struggle to substantiate their answers. Lovins struggles to leave things out.
No one has done more to change the world of energy, both its intellectual underpinnings and its real-world practice, than Lovins. Beginning with a seminal Foreign Affairs article in 1976 — "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" which introduced the "soft path" to energy — Lovins shifted the focus from bigger to smarter, from more to more-with-less. He’s consulted with businesses, governments, and militaries on how to achieve organizational goals using less energy and less money. His books and articles are legion; the latest is Winning the Oil Endgame, a "roadmap to getting the U.S. completely, attractively, and profitably off oil."
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the "think and do tank" Lovins founded. The occasion will be celebrated in early August at an event attended by, among others, Bill Clinton and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
I gave Lovins a call to check in on some of today’s greatest energy challenges, from biofuels to Iraq to a backwards-looking Congress.
