National Treasure: Amory Lovins

Amory’s merits range from an illustrious academic background with degrees from Harvard, Oxford, holding 10 honorary doctorates and several visiting academic chairs, to winning several awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Right Livelihood Award, and the Blue Planet Prize, along with memberships including being an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

His work includes consulting several heads of state, governments, and industries around the world, writing 29 books and hundreds of papers. To emphasize RMI’s status as a think-and-do tank Amory has lead the redesign of more than $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors for radical energy and resource efficiency.

So if you have not heard of him before, you might be asking yourself, “How do I not know about this guy?” Well, do not sweat it, I did not know about him until I started looking at RMI for an internship. To me, Amory is the guy who has been right about energy policy ever since he wrote a 1976 essay entitled “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken.” After the shock of the 1973 oil crisis Amory appealed to people and policymakers to learn from the crisis through said essay in Foreign Affairs.

His message is something increasingly heard: we should pursue “soft energy paths” by promoting energy efficiency and reaping so-called “nega-watts.” As Amory recounted to me, the term “nega-watt” came from a typo which accidentally and instantly chimed in with his thinking. His thoughts on energy efficiency, as well as related issues including nuclear power, are oft cited and have been way ahead of his time.

One of my first experiences with Amory was when he asked me to sit in on a phone interview with a monthly magazine. He was asked if he gets frustrated for being right on so many issues for so long without concomitant policy action? He answered, “No.” Instead, he believes much progress has been made in what he deems a “quiet revolution” of increased productivity and efficiency in many sectors. At the same time, he embodies the saying by Frederick Douglass, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Amory and the passionate staff he attracts are constantly looking for salient leverage points to apply relevant innovation and information.

I hope you go see Amory Lovins speak when he comes to Duke on November 4^th, because even though he has been working on energy issues for a long time, his way of looking at topics is sobering, provocative, and hopeful. For example, I worked all summer on the topic of transit-oriented development and thought I had a good grasp of the subject, but along came Amory who took one look at my work and asked me questions I would never think to ask by approaching the topic through lateral thinking while remaining grounded in terms of political feasibility and social justice.

During my first week at RMI I had a group dinner with the President of RMI, Michael Potts, who told me that Amory is nothing short of a “national treasure.” At the time he said that, all I knew about Amory was that he really, really loves orangutans since his house is full of fluffy, stuffed orangutans. I remember hearing somewhere that the name “Orang-utan” is derived from the Malay language meaning “man of the forest.” After a summer with a true renaissance man, I can tell you that the two are not mutually exclusive. Amory could be the Jane Goodall of orangutans if he wanted, but instead he has chosen to dedicate his life to enlightening and engaging popular and political discourse on energy policy. A national treasure indeed.