Amory Lovins.

His name connotes a genre, a school of thought, an entire outlook on energy efficiency, conservation, and the use of renewable resources. Amory Lovins, forty-seven, directs research at Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit resource policy center in Colorado, which he and his wife, Hunter, founded thirteen years ago. Its mission is to foster the efficient and sustainable use of resources as a path to global security.

Trained as a physicist, Lovins has published twenty-two books and hundreds of technical and popular papers, and consulted for scores of utilities, governments, and industries worldwide. A self-avowed "techno twit," in 1993 he was granted a genius award from the MacArthur Foundation. Lovins's wit and humor give him a remarkable ability to grasp problems, see creative solutions, and bring about institutional change. He traverses the globe in his mission to bring resource-efficiency reason into the energy-pohliy world.

The conservationist David Brower encouraged Lovins not to finish his studies at Oxford nearly twenty-five years ago. He had better things to do, says Brower, who enlisted Lovins in a stunningly successful wilderness-conservation effort. Lovins took photos, conducted research, and wrote text for a large coffee-table book about the plans of the world's biggest mining company, RTZ, to strip-mine copper in Snowdonia National Park, or as it's locally called, Eryri, in North Wales. The mining company went away mad but better off, since the copper market crashed soon thereafter.

"Amory set a standard by inventing the soft energy path, which challenged everything," says Brower. "He said America had too much energy, that the hydro-nuclear-coal-electric grid was silly, often unnecessary, heavily subsidized by taxpayers, dangerous, and uneconomical, that the peaceful atom was a myth masking a bloated war machine. This shook some of us, but Amory had the figures to back himself up. He always does."

Seemingly indefatigable, Lovins continues to lecture widely. I spoke with him during a 1994 visit to San Francisco.

Q: How is the health of Rocky Mountain Institute?

Lovins: RMI is rich in accomplishments and potential, even though financially we're still nomadic hunter-gatherers. In 1982, my wife and colleague, Hunter, and I wanted to gather together a handful of colleagues so that we could work more effectively than by ourselves. The handful got a bit out of hand. We now have a staff of forty in Old Snowmass, plus another thirty in a Boulder subsidiary called E SOURCE, the leading source of technical information about advanced electric efficiency. After thirteen years, the Institute has ripened into an important source of innovation, working on the connections among energy, transportation, water, agriculture, local economic development, green real-estate projects, and global security. We found that by combining advanced technology, creative use of market forces, aikido politics, and Jeffersonian community organizing, we can solve many problems at once without making new ones, and can usually protect the environment not at a cost but at a profit.

Q: With your local economic-development program, have you discovered many good working examples of sustainable bottom-up strategies?

Lovins: Yes-hundreds of them. Let's take just one. Osage, Iowa, population 3,800, had a municipal utility which for about a dozen years helped people to save energy in simple ways. As a result, the utility was able to prepay all its debt, build up a healthy surplus for emergencies, and cut the rates five times in five years (in fact, they went down by one-third excluding inflation, to only half the state average). That in turn attracted two big factories to town and kept the existing ones competitive in global markets: the sock-knitting mill even tripled its number of employees.

Most importantly, the energy savings then kept in town more than $1,000 per household per year--money that had previously gone out of town and out of state to buy utility inputs, but is now sticking around Main Street, supporting local jobs and multipliers, and making Osage noticeably more prosperous than comparable towns nearby.

Q: So RMI is actively working to promote the notion that regional sustainable bottom-up economic development is possible and practical?

Lovins: Yes. RMI's Economic Renewal Project has developed a series of workbooks and casebooks that citizen task forces can use on their own. Within weeks of our training people in Kentucky, some of them had the process up and running in their own communities with no further help from us. That is just what we wanted to achieve. It's effectively a dehydrated instant development kit--just add activist and stir.

Q: What is the status of our progress down the "soft energy path"--the use of efficiency and renewable energy?

Lovins: We've already cut the energy bill in the United States by about $160 billion a year. But we're still wasting over $300-billion-a-year worth of energy. We've hardly scratched the surface of how much efficiency or renewable supply is available or worth buying. So we've made dramatic progress. But far from exhausting the cheapest opportunities, we've built up an ever-bigger backlog of untapped ways to get better services with less energy and less money.

Q: Is the nuclear industry history?

Lovins: The nuclear industry is dead in all market economies--that is, places where market decisions govern the energy sector. It's still barely clinging to life, thanks to heroic life-support measures, in a few centrally planned energy systems--notably in Russia, China, Japan, France, Taiwan, and South Korea--based on clearly noneconomic motives. In America, at least a third of all the operating reactors, and arguably a lot more, will be shut down by the end of this decade because we can't afford to keep running and fixing them. The more competition we have in the electric sector, the more those costly-to-repair nuclear plants will be exposed as uncompetitive. In fact, their excessive costs are the biggest single factor behind major industries' recent moves to restructure the utility industry: some big industries want to evade those costs by shifting them to smaller and weaker customers.

Q: You've now been working on the "supercar" concept for several years. How is it going?

Lovins: We just changed the name from "supercar" to "hypercar" to avoid confusion: the press was calling any more efficient car a "supercar," no matter how mediocre it was or how it was designed, and racing people use "supercar" to refer to street-licensed race cars that get about 200 miles per hour, not per gallon.

Q: OK, so it's a "hypercar." What is it?

Lovins: A hypercar, technically called an ultralight hybrid, is an artful fusion of two innovations. One is to make the car ultralight-three or four times lighter than now by using very strong, bouncy composite materials--and aerodynamically very slippery. That, plus better tires. normally improves the car's efficiency by a factor of two to two-and-a-hall The other main change is to make the car hybrid-electric. This means that the wheels are driven by special electric motors, but the electricity to drive those motors is made on board as needed by burning any convenient fuel in a tiny engine or other power plant. The car doesn't get its energy from a half-ton of batteries that must be plugged in to recharge; instead, we get energy from fuel, because fuel contains 100 times as much energy per pound as the best batteries do. Hybrid drive improves the efficiency of a normal car by maybe 30 percent to 50 percent. But three years ago, I was astonished to find that if you make a car ultralight and hybrid, its efficiency goes up by roughly five- to twenty-fold.

The resulting car can carry your family coast-to-coast on one tank of any fuel, liquid or gaseous, fossil or renewable. It can be sportier, safer, and more beautiful, quiet, durable, and comfortable than normal cars--and probably cheaper. It's also about 100 to 1,000 times cleaner.

Hypercars are competitively advantageous to automakers, because they can reduce product-cycle time, assembly space and labor, and tooling costs by close to ten-fold, and the number of parts by even more. Making hypercars is a completely different kind of business. It's very agile, with cheap tooling, local production, probably direct sale to the customer, and on-site maintenance--just like a mail-order personal computer.

The car would be superior in all respects. People would buy it because it's a better car, not because it saves fuel and prevents pollution: they'd buy it for the reason they now buy CDs instead of vinyl records.

Altogether, bringing automaking out of the Iron Age will be the biggest change in industrial structure since the microchip. It has profound ramifications for America's competitiveness, foreign policy, oil imports, military missions....

Q: What would it do to oil imports?

Lovins: Oil imports would become unnecessary, because worldwide, hypercars and their heavy-vehicle analogues would save more oil than OPEC now extracts. The Middle East would therefore become irrelevant and the price would crash. With so little demand, most of the oil in the ground would be no longer worth extracting. This has already happened to most of the coal and uranium in the ground: they're now mainly good for holding up the ground. Attractive new markets would also open up for biofuels. Just fuels sustainably derived from farm and forestry wastes could run the whole U.S. transportation sector.

Q: But why save oil when we're awash in the stuff?

Lovins: Although oil looks cheap today--we sell gasoline for less than bottled water--it isn't really cheap. It's costing our country close to $50 billion a year in trade deficit, and the same again in peacetime-military-readiness costs. We recently put a bunch of our young people in 0.56-mile-per-gallon tanks and seventeen-feet-per-gallon aircraft carriers because we hadn't put them in thirty-two-mile-per-gallon cars. That's all we would have needed to do to displace the need for any oil from the Persian Gulf. If we had just kept on saving oil as quickly after 1985 as we did for the previous nine years, we would not have needed a drop of oil from the Persian Gulf since then. Failure to do that cost our nation some $23 billion last year alone in unnecessary oil imports. And by wasting that money and weakening the economy, that wasted oil cost a lot of American jobs.

Q: What are the chances we'll soon see commercial availability of something like a "hypercar"?

Lovins: Excellent, because everything required is already commercially available; what's missing is only the system integration to put them together. And this is starting to happen not only on paper but on real wheels. A light hybrid two-seater the size of a Corvette, built by students at Western Washington University, was tested in Los Angeles traffic last year by the US. Department of Energy. It got the equivalent of 202 miles per gallon, and the next version, now in testing, should do even better.

Q: Are you getting the same kind of resistance to this radical idea that you did when you used to say how much electricity could be cost-effectively saved?

Lovins: A little, for understandable cultural reasons--hypercars would turn the auto industry completely upside down, and that naturally makes some of its inhabitants uncomfortable--but not as much as I'd expected. Some auto-company engineers are even more radical than I am about what can be done. Since this work got the Nissan Prize in autumn 1993 at ISATA, the big European car-technology conference, the big boys have been paying very careful attention.

Q: Why didn't you just patent your idea and sell it to the highest bidder?

Lovins: Because our mission at Rocky Mountain Institute is to save resources, not to get rich. So rather than trying to patent and auction off the hypercar work and then hope the buyer doesn't sit on it, we deliberately put most of it into the public domain and got everyone fighting over it. We suspected that getting the competitive juices flowing would get more and better hypercars on the road faster than any exclusively proprietary arrangement. So far, that judgment has been well vindicated. This may mean that we don't make much, if any, money off of creating a trillion-dollar industry, but if so, that may be the price of getting lots of good hypercars to market quickly.

Q: What other innovations excite you?

Lovins: An inexpensive, easy-to-make, easy-to-fix photovoltaic ultraviolet disinfectant for water. Water circulates through a trough in thin layers and gets exposed to hard ultraviolet light made by a solar-powered lamp. The water that comes out is free of disease-causing bacteria and viruses. Once it's deployed in a few years, this gadget will save millions of babies now dying of dysentery and similar water-borne diseases.

Superwindows continue to evolve. We now have versions that can let in light without unwanted heat, so that in very hot or cold climates, we can eliminate heating or cooling equipment, and therefore save enormous amounts of energy, pollution, and capital costs. In RMI's headquarters, we're growing our eighteenth passive-solar banana crop with no furnace despite outdoor temperatures as low as minus-forty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, and it was cheaper than usual to construct.

Two of my colleagues have an exciting research finding that may change the way energy efficiency is sold. In well-designed, very efficient offices, labor productivity typically goes up by about 6 percent to 16 percent, because people can see what they are doing, hear themselves think, and feel more comfortable. With better working conditions, they can do more and better work. This isn't surprising, although it flies in the face of management theory which claims that the building doesn't matter--all that matters is how you manage people. A 1 percent gain in labor productivity does the same for a business's bottom line as eliminating its electric bills. So this is a benefit about ten times as important as eliminating the electric bills, and yet we hadn't been counting it before.

Q: What is going to happen to public utilities in today's political climate?

Lovins: The American utility industry is now in the greatest turmoil in its century of history because of this idea called "retail wheeling"--a concept so bizarre that it would have been largely ignored if the previously sensible California Public Utilities Commission hadn't given it credence by proposing last April to adopt it whole hog. Over the past couple of decades, states allowed utilities to build some very expensive plants (mainly nuclear plants) or to buy some very expensive private power. Today, with 20/20 hindsight, it is clear that these investments were a bad buy. As a result, some utilities, including all three of the big private ones in California, now have rates much higher than those of some neighboring utilities. Some big industrial customers, collectively using perhaps 4 percent of the nation's electricity, want to avoid paying for that costly power. Instead, they want to buy the cheapest power on the system and make everyone else pay for the expensive power. That would reverse a principle central to the whole history of utility regulation-sharing all electricity fairly.

Q: Do you consider yourself a radical?

Lovins: No--with apologies to Fritz Schumacher, who was once called a crank, and replied, "You know, I rather like that: cranks are simple and nonviolent, and they cause revolutions." What I'm doing is deeply conservative. (I don't say that in the modern misuse of the term to mean "reactionary.") I'm not really telling people anything they don't already know, except perhaps in technical details, but rather new ways of putting ideas together. Most truths are already known; they're just not articulated. They seem obvious, not surprising.

Q: So you believe we have all the technologies at hand to solve our technical problems?

Lovins: Yes, but we have trouble seeing what is not a technical problem. Many problems need completely different kinds of solutions: for example, how do we meet nonmaterial needs by nonmaterial means? I'm particularly concerned about the depletion of renewable resources. I'm not nearly so concerned about the depletion of nonrenewable resources such as oil or copper as about the depletion of things that ought to be renewable but are being mined, such as topsoil, biodiversity, social tolerance, traditional culture, civic virtue, and morality.

Q: But you are hopeful about the future?

Lovins: Yes, much more so than I was a few years ago. It's the most exciting time to be alive that I can find anywhere in history. In rare rational moments I actually do think we may get out of this difficult cultural adolescence in one piece. There will certainly be some difficult times and some awful events ahead of us, but we are seeing more and more signs of a sudden cessation of stupidity.

Q: So holding out for a sustainable future isn't unreasonable?

Lovins: No--and not only in the sense that cultural suicide is unprofitable, but also because almost everything one would want to do for sustainability is also more profitable, even in the narrowest economic terms, than what we are doing now. I suppose this idea--that elegant frugality pays--is the most prominent theme of what I've been doing for the past twenty years.

Q: What are your individual goals?

Lovins: My hierarchy of needs is to save the world, have fun, and make money, in that order. I would like to leave the world a much better place than I found it, and help other people to do their best.

David Kupfer is a freelance writer in northwest California, where he grows organic food. His last interview for The Progressive was with David Brower in the May 1994 issue. For more information about RMI, write: 1739 Snowmass Creek Road, Snowmass, CO 81654-9199.