One of the reasons that I write so often about Amory Lovins is that I believe that the man is a danger to the health and prosperity of billions of people. His views, if accepted, would put the world into a precarious position with less access to clean water, healthy food and reliable electrical power.
Unfortunately, he has a great PR department that helps him gain access to the halls of the Pentagon and to feature articles in important publications like The Economist magazine.
Please go and read The frugal cornucopian from the September 4, 2008 print edition of The Economist and take the time to make a comment. Help people to understand and to cut through the foggy thinking that Lovins and RMI represent. Click for the full version of the post to read a copy of my contribution to the discussion:
I have had the frustrating experience of listening to Amory Lovins lecture on a number of occasions. He is a fast talker whose math rarely makes sense. One of the most interesting quotes I have heard from him was during a recent interview (July 16, 2008) on Amy Goodman’s excellent daily radio show – Democracy Now!
Here is Lovins in his own voice: “You know, I’ve worked for major oil companies for about thirty-five years, and they understand how expensive it is to drill for oil.”
If you read Lovins’s work carefully, you will find that he accepts or even promotes almost every form of energy except for nuclear fission power. The battle against abundant nuclear fission makes fossil fuel far more profitable and enriches Lovins friends in the major oil companies.
Lovins’s claim that America’s economy decoupled itself from energy consumption is bogus. All we really did was to move the energy consumption needed for our prosperous lifestyles to places like China, Taiwan, Thailand, India, Mexico, Canada and other places that now produce many of the hard goods that we all love to purchase and use.
By exporting our manufacturing base, we exported a portion of our energy demand. All manufactured products contain an inherent energy ingredient, but when the energy is added before the goods arrive in shipping containers it does not get counted in our government’s limited statistical analysis.
