The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins

(Page 15 of 15)

November/December 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors 
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I think there's a real danger in leaving energy policy to technical and economic "experts". Our leaders don't really understand the issues. And they don't understand the choice that's now before them. We stand at a crossroads, and without decisive action soon, our options will slip away.

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PLOWBOY: You mean the soft and hard energy paths are mutually exclusive? It's one or the other?

If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.

LOVINS: Yes. That was one of the key points I tried to make in the Foreign Affairs article. We must make the transition to a soft energy path soon, or else we will— in two or three decades —have already used up the resources we need to get there. If we don't start building a bridge to a soft-path future now, we may well find—in the year 2000—that we've delayed the use of soft technologies until the bridge to them has been burned. We may find that we've sunk the capital we needed to solar-heat our homes and insulate our roofs into giant nuclear reactors that can never pay us back. We may find we've trained a lot of nuclear fusion and fission engineers, and not enough organic conversion engineers. We may find that the institutional barriers we didn't attempt to change when we could have changed them are no longer changeable!

We can't go on believing that fusion or fission or some other godsend is going to solve all our energy problems "in just a few more years". We can't go on thinking that because the oil companies and big government are—if you believe their ads—doing so much to solve the "energy crisis", that we needn't even insulate our roofs or conserve gasoline! But that's not really true. The time for action is now. We haven't a minute to spare.

Some people say that a soft energy path entails mainly social problems and a hard path mainly technical problems, and that since—in the past we've been better at solving the technical problems than social ones, those are the kind of problems we should incur now. But the hard path, too, involves difficult social problems ... we can't escape them any longer. It's a matter of which kinds of social problems we want.

I think it's time we come to grips with this fact. The most important, difficult, and neglected questions of energy strategy are not mainly technical, but rather social and ethical. They will—no doubt—pose a supreme challenge to the adaptability of our democratic institutions and the vitality of our spiritual life. But I believe we can meet this challenge. We must, for we shall not have another chance to do so.

Amory Lovins's books—Eryri, The Mountains of Longing ($14.95), Red Alert: Openpit Mining ($1.75), The Stockholm Conference: Only One Earth ($3.95), World Energy Strategies ($4.95), Non-Nuclear Futures ($6.95), and Soft Energy Paths ($6.95)—can all be ordered from Friends of the Earth at 124 Spear St., San Francisco, Calif. 94105. If you're a resident of California, add 6% sales tax to your order... and regardless of where you live, be sure to include 750 extra per book for postage and handling. —The Editors.

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