Energy guru Amory Lovins lays out his plan for weaning the US off oil and revitalizing the economy in the process at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California. It’s the subject of his book Winning the Oil Endgame, and he makes it sound fairly simple: On one hand, the deadly risks of continued dependency, and on the other, some win-win solutions.
The basis of his approach is that peak oil and climate change are engineering problems, not moral ones and that we simply need to think hard to come up with solutions. One of his most accessible solutions is to reduce the weight of automobiles by more than half. Currently most cars weigh at least ten times the human that drives them. This means that ninety percent of the energy they consume is used to drive the car, not the passenger around.