The New Yorker has a great profile of Amory Lovins written by journalist, book author, and interviewee Elizabeth Kolbert. (It's not online -- check last week's issue.)
It's a fantastic piece, really capturing Lovins' entrepreneurial drive not just to do research and develop strategies but to evangelize for his perspective. He's tireless trying to get his stuff into the right hands.
I suspect most everybody in the green world has mixed feelings about Lovins, and the piece captures that as well. On one hand, reading Lovins for the first time can be a life-changing experience, one of those moments when your entire perception of the world shifts and you see everything in a new light. Kolbert writes:
To spend time with Lovins is to see the world as one long string of bad decisions. Waste and profligacy are everywhere: in inefficient lights, heat-leaking windows, gas-guzzling trucks, poorly designed eateries. It's not that people are stupid, exactly. It's that their intelligence is limited. When they make decisions, they tend to worry only about their own self-interest, which they see in such narrow terms that they miss the larger opportunities all around.
Lovins's world is filled with perverse incentives. To get the change we want, we don't have to strain and push. We just have to remove the barriers that are holding it back. Revelatory news!
But then, there's the nagging thought. Lovins can always talk and explain and persuade better than we can -- he's a friggin' genius -- but the intuitive question keeps returning: if there were so many errors, and so much benefit to be gained by correcting them, and it's all so easy ... why isn't it happening? Something doesn't fit. Kolbert writes:
Lovins's promise that apparently intractable problems -- oil dependence, global warming, nuclear proliferation -- can be profitably resolved is both the great appeal of his approach and its biggest liability. Much of what he recommends sounds just too good to be true, the econometric version of "Shed pounds by eating chocolate!"
I can't resolve that tension, but I can recommend Kolbert's piece.
Comments View as Flat
sunflower Posted 8:23 am
22 Jan 2007
AB Lovins lives in the future
It is very strange talking to someone in the future.
He once described the energy use since the middle ages. Humanity has consistently improved energy efficiency on a per capita basis. With all our machines, we now use one-third the energy of that used during the beast of burden era. We will easily make the same efficiency leap again.
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GRLCowan Posted 9:04 am
22 Jan 2007
My "Sent" file ...
contains rather a lot of comments on Lovins. If he didn't exist, oil money would have to invent someone just like him, so maybe a couple of the best can bear repeating:
http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.energy.hydrogen/msg/f6f...
http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.energy.hydrogen/msg/b68...
Plus there's this one, better than any of mine, capturing the essence in just 15 words ... or rather, capturing the propane:
http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.environment/msg/e352954...
--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron combustion fan
Oxygen expands around B fire, car goes
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bkrell Posted 2:25 pm
22 Jan 2007
How it will happen
Lovins gets what so many enviros don't. Energy efficiency and conservation are only going to catch on when clear profit motive can be seen. We are a capitalist society and that's not going to change anytime soon. It doesn't have to be an either/or proposition.
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Tom Athanasiou Posted 5:28 pm
22 Jan 2007
Clauswitz called it "friction"
I once thought a lot about this. What I figure Amory is missing is an appreciation for what Karl Von Clauswitz (in "On War") called "friction." That is to say, things just don't work out, in practice, not in the smooth way you think they're going to. Reality is to multivarient, too contradictory, too ornery.
Thus the general, dreaming over his charts, does not consider muddy tracks, missed rendevous, divided loyalies.
Also, you gotta think that Lovins, just because he is so bright, might be particularly prone to this sort of error.
On the other hand, he might just be doing what he does best. After all, he has his greatest impact by stayone on message.
-- toma
Tom Athanasiou toma@ecoequity.org
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Steven T Posted 12:48 am
23 Jan 2007
Amory, Amory, Amory
One of my favorite Amory quotes is the first paragraph in Natural Capitalism. Sure, he co-authored that book, but the technoscientic utopia he paints is truly breathtaking in its one-dimensionality.
Amory thinks like an engineer -- he really believes good design can save all. This is an underlying flaw of so much rhetoric in the "sustainabiility" movement.
Sure, we can to some degree "engineer" our way out of ecological crises such as global warming. What is not adequately appreciated is that political power relationships go a long way toward determining design outcomes. Here Amory has always been tone deaf. Frankly, so have some other major sustainability voices.
We need to get beyond bright white guys designing cool new toys.
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pbearden47 Posted 1:39 am
23 Jan 2007
New to me
I had never read about Amory Lovins so this was a wonderful revelatory article for me. It's great to hear a consistent positive voice, and a person who looks for solutions. If 10% of his ideas work, we'll be on the road to sustainability.
There may be political forces that are resistant, but I do think industrial/corporate America is starting to move toward the idea that energy efficiency is better for the bottom line.
Aunt Phyllis
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jhutson Posted 2:04 pm
06 Feb 2007
Propane tank used for cooking, not heating
Yes, there's a propane tank at Amory Lovin's residence. But it is not used for heating the house, as the poster suggests. Instead, it's used for the cooking stove. Check it out yourself: the house is open to the public for tours.
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erich Posted 8:48 pm
14 Feb 2007
Terra Preta Soils Technology To Master the Carbon
Can you please forward this post to Elizabeth Kolbert , she should be most interested. The New Yorker just bounces my emails.
Thanks
Dear Ms. Kolbert,
I haven't read your book, but had to immediately write to you after your "Talk of the Town" piece in the recent New Yorker. The grasp you have on this problem is unsurpassed for such a short piece. Many of the principals you talk of involved in anthroprogenic global warming I have posted to, but your piece is a target-rich environment for those that I have missed. Thank you for this laundry list that I'll be cleaning up my work with. I have already posted to Exxon, et al, when the news first came out that they dropped AEI support a few weeks ago, it should be interesting when their financial reports are out and we get to see who else and how much they spent. Now the rest of the day I'll be posting to the energy policy people that you highlighted.
I wished to apprise them of this integrated energy and carbon sequestration technology.
After many years of reviewing solutions to anthropogenic global warming (AGW) I believe this technology
can manage Carbon for the greatest collective benefit at the lowest economic price.
Below is my review of these efforts in the Academic and private sectors, please forward this to all the experts you know, if you think it merits their time and support.
Thanks for your attention
Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar@aol.com
(540) 289-9750
Terra Preta Soils Technology To Master the Carbon Cycle
Man has been controlling the carbon cycle , and there for the weather, since the invention of agriculture, all be it was as unintentional, as our current airliner contrails are in affecting global dimming. This unintentional warm stability in climate has over 10,000 years, allowed us to develop to the point that now we know what we did,............ and that now......... we are over doing it.
The prehistoric and historic records gives a logical thrust for soil carbon sequestration.
I wonder what the soil biome carbon concentration was REALLY like before the cutting and burning of the world's virgin forest, my guess is that now we see a severely diminished community, and that only very recent Ag practices like no-till and reforestation have started to help rebuild it. It makes implementing Terra Preta soil technology like an act of penitence, a returning of the misplaced carbon to where it belongs.
Energy, the carbon cycle and greenhouse gas management
http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Fora%20Input ...
On the Scale of CO2 remediation:
It is my understanding that atmospheric CO2 stands at 379 PPM, to stabilize the climate we need to reduce it to 350 PPM by the removal of 230 Billion tons.
The best estimates I've found are that the total loss of forest and soil carbon (combined
pre-industrial and industrial) has been about 200-240 billion tons. Of
that, the soils are estimated to account for about 1/3, and the vegetation
the other 2/3.
Since man controls 24 billion tons in his agriculture then it seems we have plenty to work with in sequestering our fossil fuel CO2 emissions as stable charcoal in the soil.
As Dr. Lehmann at Cornell points out, "Closed-Loop Pyrolysis systems such as Dr. Danny Day's are the only way to make a fuel that is actually carbon negative". and that " a strategy combining biochar with biofuels could ultimately offset 9.5 billion tons of carbon per year-an amount equal to the total current fossil fuel emissions! "
Terra Preta Soils Carbon Negative Bio fuels, massive Carbon sequestration and 3X FertilityToo
This some what orphaned new soil technology speaks to so many different interests and disciplines that it has not been embraced fully by any. I'm sure you will see both the potential of this system and the convergence needed for it's implementation.
The integrated energy strategy offered by Charcoal based Terra Preta Soil technology may
provide the only path to sustain our agricultural and fossil fueled power
structure without climate degradation, other than nuclear power.
The economics look good, and truly great if we had CO2 cap & trade in place:
Terra Preta soils I feel has great possibilities to revolutionize sustainable agriculture into a major CO2 sequestration strategy.
I thought, I first read about these soils in " Botany of Desire " or "Guns,Germs,&Steel" but I could not find reference to them. I finely found the reference in Charles Mann's "1491", but I did not realize their potential .
Nature article: Putting the carbon back Black is the new green:
http://bestenergies.com/downloads/naturemag_200604.pdf
This Earth Science Forum thread on these soils contains further links, and has been viewed by 19,000 self-selected folks. ( I post everything I find on Amazon Dark Soils, ADS here):
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-science/3451-terra-pre ...
Terra Preta Discussion , central data base, and Mail list at REPP-CREST:
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=about
Ther ... ) which could use existing infrastructure to provide Charcoal sustainable Agriculture , Syn-Fuels, and a variation of this process would also work as well for H2 production and Charcoal-Fertilizer, while sequestering CO2, NO2 and SO2 from Coal fired plants to build soils at large scales , be sure to read the "See an initial analysis NEW" link of this technology to clean up Coal fired power plants.
Soil erosion, energy scarcity, excess greenhouse gas all answered through regenerative carbon management http://www.newfarm.org/columns/research_paul/2006/0106/ch ...
The reason TP has elicited such interest on the Agricultural/horticultural side of it's benefits is this one static:
One gram of charcoal cooked to 650 C Has a surface area of 400 m2 (for soil microbes & fungus to live on), now for conversion fun:
One ton of charcoal has a surface area of 400,000 Acres!! which is equal to 625 square miles!! Rockingham Co. VA. , where I live, is only 851 Sq. miles
Now at a middle of the road application rate of 2 lbs/sq ft (which equals 1000 sqft/ton) or 43 tons/acre yields 26,000 Sq miles of surface area per Acre. VA is 39,594 Sq miles.
What this suggest to me is a potential of sequestering virgin forest amounts of carbon just in the soil alone, without counting the forest on top.
To take just one fairly representative example, in the classic Rothampstead experiments in England where arable land was allowed to revert to deciduous temperate woodland, soil organic carbon increased 300-400% from around 20 t/ha to 60-80 t/ha (or about 140-190 tons per acre) in less than a century (Jenkinson & Rayner 1977). The rapidity with which organic carbon can build up in soils is also indicated by examples of buried steppe soils formed during short-lived interstadial phases in Russia and Ukraine. Even though such warm, relatively moist phases usually lasted only a few hundred years, and started out from the skeletal loess desert/semi-desert soils of glacial conditions (with which they are inter-leaved), these buried steppe soils have all the rich organic content of a present-day chernozem soil that has had many thousands of years to build up its carbon (E. Zelikson, Russian Academy of Sciences, pers. comm., May 1994). http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/carbon1.html
...
Eprida: Sustainable Solutions for Global Concerns
http://www.eprida.com/home/index.php4
BEST Pyrolys ...
Dynamotive Energy Systems | The Evolution of Energy
http://www.dynamotive.com/
Ensyn - Environmentally ...
Agri-Therm, developing bio oils from agricultural waste
http://www.agri-therm.com/
Advanced BioRefinery In ...
Technology Review: Turning Slash into Cash
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/17298/
The ... )
.
If pre-Columbian Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 20% of the Amazon basin it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.
Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of energy return over energy input (EROEI) for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.
We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.
I feel Terra Preta soil technology is the greatest of Ironies.
That is: an invention of pre-Columbian American culture, destroyed by western disease, may well be the savior of industrial western society.
Thanks,
Erich
Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar at aol.com
(540) 289-9750
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robinhoodstfrancis Posted 2:44 am
01 Mar 2008
Amory's on Our Side
I have reached the point where I guess I'm reflecting Klausewitz's insight, for the sake of addressing Neoliberal economics' hold on so many people.
I am thankful for Lovins' work and attitudes. While he promotes the efficiency imperatives within Neoliberalism's false, but powerful, premises, I support the reform and alternatives of what might be called "democratic-maximization economics". As William Greider discusses in his book The Soul of Capitalism, the solution lies in the obvious focus on responsible ownership practice, as promoted by ESOP's and more.
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