The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins
(Page 4 of 15)
November/December 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
In the beginning of my Foreign Affairs article, I put some numbers into the hard path in order to show people the kinds of commitments such a path entails. The numbers are rather shocking. In a hard path, the year 2000 finds us with 450 to 800 nuclear reactors in this country ... 500 to 800 huge coal-fired power stations ... 1,000 to 1,600 new coal mines . . . 900 new offshore oil wells . . . and perhaps fifteen million electric automobiles. To say nothing of the severe social problems we can look forward to. Problems such as increasing inequity. High technical risk. High vulnerability to the kind of mistake we've just seen in New York City. Very high financial cost ... so high-in fact-that we wouldn't have enough money left in fifty years to pay for the things that were supposed to use all the energy!
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PLOWBOY: You're painting a very grim picture ... one that certainly doesn't jibe with the "more is better" philosophy on which so many of us were brought up.
LOVINS: Quite,true. That's why I think that if—as the proponents of the hard path often tell us—there's no alternative to the scenario I've just described, we might as well all go home and forget about trying to create a saner society.
But I believe there's another way to look at the energy problem. . . a way that leads us in a much nicer direction.
PLOWBOY: And that is ...
LOVINS: It's the soft energy path I talked about in the Foreign Affairs article. If you're interested in a soft path, you start with a different view of what the energy problem is ... and you find that it isn't simply a problem of how to expand supplies to meet extrapolated demands. You don't just talk about "future energy requirements". Instead you talk about who's going to require how much of what kind of energy for what purposes for how long. Amazingly, these issues are very new in the energy policy community.
Now if you start with that view, you begin to see that the rate at which a society gobbles energy isn't so much a measure of that society's success or well-being anymore, but rather of its failure. Schumacher's notion of Buddhist economics comes into play here. If your goal is to get someplace, the amount of traffic you have to endure to get there isn't a measure of how wonderful your transportation system is ... it's a reflection of your failure to establish a rational settlement pattern in which you already live near where you wanted to be in the first place! It's the same with energy use.
The whole point of thinking along soft path lines is to do whatever it is you want to do, using as little energy—and other resources—as possible. Once you start with that rather different view of what the problem is, you naturally find that there are other ways to approach the solution.
PLOWBOY: OK. How do you approach the solution?
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