Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [78]
As different as corporate projections and Our Hopeful Future might seem, they both failed because they rested on mountains of assumptions about what kinds of change were and weren’t possible. The ways that Cohn’s book deals with the future illuminates the innards of the corporate projections. Both types of documents imagined few disruptive changes. Commuters might trade in cars for helicopters, but they would still go to managerial jobs in suits, even if those suits were made of yellow polyester. Although the world of the Futures might seem radical, Emily Future still works at home and the best entertainment option she has is pinochle. Women playing an old Jewish men’s game was Cohn’s idea of radical social change.
The impossibility of disruption in both the corporate and Cohn’s speculations is why they ultimately failed in the way that they did. They could not accommodate any real change in American society or values, or even a change in the nature and pace of technical advances. Utility executives did not comprehend the rising importance of environmentalism or foresee geopolitical crisis. They were shocked to find that their costs of generation could rise and doubly shocked that the kilowatt-hour price of electricity was not the only metric of importance to Americans.10
Then, as the 1970s rolled on, that the nation was undergoing a nearly unimaginable transition became clear. But if policymakers and the public couldn’t be guided by simple demand forecasts, how were they supposed to make decisions? To displace the erroneous forecasts, energy conservation promoters needed to present an alternative way of thinking.
A group of physicists, drawn to energy problems by the oil crisis, synthesized a new way of thinking about power plants by asking a simple question: What do we need all this energy for? Their credentials turned them into incredibly effective and influential advocates for energy conservation, giving them an instrumental role in constructing—inventing—an alternative vision for the American energy system.
The most well known of these physicists is Amory Lovins, something of a child prodigy and the kind of character people like to call an enfant terrible. His classic Soft Energy Paths is probably the single most influential energy policy paper in American history not because of the details of his argument but rather because he was able to articulate a coherent point of view about what America should do at a time of tremendous turmoil.
Few people inspire more or greater divergence of opinion in the energy world than Lovins. He argued for a future based not on technological imperatives, which were really just rules of thumb aggrandized into laws, but instead on how life should be. Lovins exposed that lurking within the carefully crafted projections of 7 percent growth in electricity per year, there was a social argument, an argument about the way America should be. When he rendered the visions of the technocratic utility executives in plain English, they seemed almost ludicrous.
He ticked off what would be necessary to satisfy the sky-high projections of demand just through 1985: 900 new oil wells, 170 new coal mines, 180 new coal plants, 140 new nuclear plants, and 350 gas turbines. By the year 2000 the numbers got downright preposterous: 450 to 800 nuclear reactors, 1000 to 1,600 new coal mines, and 15 million electric automobiles. The energy industry alone would have required almost 75 percent of all the “net private domestic investment” from 1976 to 1985.11 If we were building all that stuff, there’d be no money left over to support other businesses. When he pulled these numbers out of the infrastructure planning world and asked his fellow citizens, “Is this what you want?” many of them, including politicians, answered, “Huh. Actually, no!”
Both Lovins’s supporters and his opponents have slightly exaggerated Lovins’s role, perhaps. This