The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins
(Page 3 of 15)
November/December 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
PLOWBOY: What did you work on during your first couple of years as FOE's British rep?
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LOVINS: Mainly the problems of land use and national park policy ... the problems I'd addressed in the exhibit format book, Eryri, The Mountains of Longing.
PLOWBOY: This was the book about Wales?
LOVINS: It's about a part of Wales—Snowdonia National Park—where, several years ago, everything was going wrong at once. For instance, in the early seventies the Rio Tinto-Zinc Corporation wanted to start an open-pit copper mine in the Park and also dredge a very beautiful estuary for gold. Eryri was one manifestation of our disagreement about that, and as a result of the book and several other things that happened, RTZ went away mad. So the copper and gold are still there, or at least the copper. No doubt we'll have a rerun in twenty years.
Anyway, I was working on the problem in Snowdonia, which spread out into areas such as mineral land-use planning law. But then—as time went on, around 1972 or '73—I switched from that to resource policy in general and energy policy in particular, and I did another couple of books.
PLOWBOY: You're talking about Red Alert: Openpit Mining and The Stockholm Conference: Only One Earth ... is that right?
LOVINS: Yes. Meanwhile, my first energy book—World Energy Strategies—went through its first draft early in '73 as a U.N. paper, and—of course) '73 was a propitious time for anything about energy.
The next year, I spent some time putting together a semitechnical assessment of the state of the nuclear art for the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which was doing a study of the nuclear fuel cycle. This material was published early in 1975—together with analyses contributed by John H. Price—in a book called Non-Nuclear Futures.
Then—earlier this year— FOE/Ballinger brought out my third book on the subject, Soft Energy Paths.
PLOWBOY: All right. You've written three energy books in the past several years-six Friends of the Earth books altogether—and you've had numerous articles and papers published in technical journals. But by far your most celebrated piece of work—the one for which you are best known today—is an essay entitled "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" which appeared in the October '76 issue of Foreign Affairs. Since many of MOTHER's readers haven't seen that piece, I wonder if you could explainbriefly—what it was about, and why that article has been so controversial.
... the rate at which a society gobbles energy isn't so much a measure of that society's success or well-being any more, but rather of its failure.
LOVINS: I'll try. Basically, the essay outlines and contrasts two paths along which U.S. energy policies—or the energy policies of other countries—might evolve over the next fifty years or so. These paths are not forecasts or projections ... rather, they're illustrations. They're not necessarily what will or should happen ... they're a way of visualizing what might happen.
What I said in "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" is that most of the energy futures one can imagine are basically variations on one or another of two themes. The first theme—which I call a "hard" energy path—assumes that the energy problem facing this country is how to expand supplies-especially domestic supplies-of energy to meet extrapolated demands. According to hard-path advocates, the solution to this problem is to deplete all sorts of depletable fuels faster, whether it's oil, gas, coal, or uranium ... to convert those fuels into premium forms of energy, mainly electricity ... to do that conversion in ever larger, more complex, more centralized, hightechnology plants ... then to distribute the energy through big, centralized distribution networks.
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