Amory Lovins (placeholder)

An article about Amory Lovins

you must scroll down to his story, which I’ve posted below:

The New Yorker, issue of 2007-01-22
Profiles

”Mr. Green: Environmentalism’s Most Optimistic Guru”By Elizabeth Kolbert

In “Mr. Green,” Elizabeth Kolbert profiles Amory Lovins, a man who, she writes, “is routinely described, even by people who don’t particularly like or admire him, as a ‘genius.’ ” He’s the founder and C.E.O. of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a consulting firm in Snowmass, Colorado, whose goal is to promote “the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining.” Lovins’s father, an optical engineer, inspired in his son a love of tinkering. “While he was still in high school,” Kolbert writes, Lovins “built a nuclear magnetic-resonance spectrometer in his basement.” He studied a variety of subjects, including physics, at Harvard and Oxford, but chafed at straitjacketing graduation requirements and dropped out of both. He then went to work in London for the Friends of the Earth, where he wrote a book about a Welsh national park that proved instrumental in blocking a company’s plans to mine for copper there.

Lovins is a tireless deviser of both small- and large-scale ways of saving energy and increasing the efficiency of buildings, industrial processes, and even whole economies. He first came to national attention in 1976, when he was twenty-eight, Kolbert writes. “In an essay published in Foreign Affairs, he asserted that the United States could completely phase out its use of fossil fuels and do so not at a cost but at a profit.” He has remained unwavering in his conviction. Lovins, Kolbert writes, “maintains that the U.S. can eliminate its use of oil by 2050, even while reducing its coal and natural-gas consumption, enjoying unprecedented prosperity, and preserving the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Many of Lovins’s ideas, Kolbert writes, “sound radical and futuristic—ultra-light cars made of carbon fibres, vehicles that generate electricity when they’re not on the road, an economy powered by hydrogen.” But he has attracted major corporate clients like Wal-Mart and Texas Instruments, for whom his innovations achieve major savings. A Wal-Mart vice-president tells Kolbert, “In a room of ten people talking about why it can’t be done, Amory is the one working on the five ways to get there.”

In November 1991, I met Amory Lovins when he was in Traverse City, MI, consulting with the community living on Beaver Island.

That community wanted to get off the grid (electrical), and become self-sufficient by using self-sustaining, clean energy.

They have been off the grid for years now, utilizing wind power mainly.

Amory, is as he has been described: Talking to him is like trying to get a sip of water from a fire hose. He is extremely intense and passionate about conserving energy and alternative energies.

He originally coined this term to describe how the U.S. (or any government) uses electricity as its main source of energy.

He said: Using electricity as the main source of energy fuel is like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose. The vast majority of the energy used is wasted, for instance, to illuminate one light bulb.

While I was up at that conference, a small group of us had an hours’ long private session with him. He offered to crack my back, which I said yes to. I was nervous, never having had my back cracked, and having Amory do it.

My back hurt for at least a week after that.

If I had been relaxed, my back would have felt great.

Other than that little tidbit:

Amory Lovins is an intense inspiration of intellect, energy and altruism.