Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [73]
Our arguments were treated with curiosity and almost total disbelief. I was only thirty years old, and Amory was a year or so younger. I still had the long hair I’d worn as a law professor, and he looked like a colleague on the science faculty with his thick mustache, unruly hair, and old-fashioned eyeglasses, all three of which he still sports. The conventional, commonsense crowd thought we were both nuts, but I knew he made a lot of sense and understood the details of how energy could be used and consumed better than those who dismissed us. He was also already warning about the potential damage to the climate from increasing CO2 emissions.
We lost the battle—Amory has lost a lot of them over the years—but finally he may be winning the war for a clean, progressive energy future. Over the years he’s produced a flood of books and articles, often filled with mind-numbing technical detail, telling us exactly how to do what most of us now know we have to do. He’s also built a home in the Colorado mountains that maximizes conservation and clean energy use. It has no furnace; it’s heated by solar panels and heat collected in various parts of the house, including an indoor pond. When I was there a couple of years ago, Amory even had a thriving banana tree. He told me that in the past year the house had been completely self-sufficient; his total electric bill was zero.
Lovins does his work through the Rocky Mountain Institute, a firm he founded twenty-five years ago. Its mission is to use resources in a way that makes the world “secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining.” His clients have included the Department of Defense; utility, oil, and mining companies; and my presidential library. He helped Wal-Mart develop its plan to double the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet. And he assisted Texas Instruments in the design of a new chip-manufacturing plant in Richardson, Texas. At a time when so many companies say they can’t afford to operate in America anymore, Texas Instruments, largely because of energy conservation and cost-effective use of resources, was able to keep in the United States an important plant, which will use 20 percent less energy, 35 percent less water, and cost 30 percent less to build than a chip factory of the same size normally would.
The thing I like best about Amory Lovins is that he’s always been in the solutions business. He is relentlessly optimistic and gets the best results possible in every situation. While I was working on this chapter, two of his colleagues visited our home in Chappaqua, New York, to help develop and design a plan to cut the greenhouse gas emissions Hillary and I generate in our more than hundred-year-old farmhouse. More and more people are listening to Lovins, reading his articles, and implementing his practical ideas. Eventually, they’ll become part of building codes, utility design and distribution plans, and corporate operations.
Meanwhile, Lovins will keep pushing the envelope. In his recent book Winning the Oil Endgame, he argues that we can do without oil imports by 2040, do without oil entirely by 2050, and grow wealthier doing so. He says that for one-fourth the cost of buying it we could eliminate our oil use by switching to ultra-light cars, trucks, and planes (50 percent); substituting advanced biofuels for gasoline and diesel (20 percent); and replacing the rest of the oil with natural gas (30 percent). Where would we get the natural gas? By cutting electricity consumption from inefficient gas-fired power plants, of course. Lovins believes we can do all this without more taxes, legal mandates, the huge up-front shutdown and waste disposal costs of nuclear power, or even more tax incentives. We cannot do it without a much larger, better-organized market for the public goods