Amory Lovins is one of the globe’s most visionary thinkers. His focus is an issue of global proportions – the enormous potential of energy efficiency and renewable energy resources. As CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, he has already been credited with having done more than any other single individual to redefine the thinking around energy policy and to link it with environment, development and security issues. Lovins and his the team of researchers delight in challenging conventional wisdom by demonstrating advanced resource productivity that avoids depletion and pollution, and still shows a profit.
It’s not all thought and no action for Lovins. He has worked aggressively to move his ideas into widespread practice, chiefly via the private sector, spinning off several for-profit companies from the nonprofit he runs, RMI. Not surprisingly, he was chosen several years ago by the editors of The Wall Street Journal as one of the people most likely to change the face of world industry.
Amory Lovins has briefed heads of state, written and co-authored dozens of books and hundreds of papers, and served as an advisor to scores of boards, businesses and institutions. In addition, he has received countless prizes and awards including the 4th Heinz Award in Environment, Time Magazine’s “Hero for the Plant”, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Amory Lovins argues that the U.S. can operate on a fourth of the energy it now uses, while still providing the same or better services. This may seem far-fetched, but he has been accused of taking off on flights of fancy before.
Together, both he and time both have a remarkable way of proving his assertions correct. In this program, host Tim Zak, spoke with Lovins about his personal transformation from junior faculty at Oxford to supreme guru of Natural Capitalism. Newsweek has praised him as "one of the Western world's most influential energy thinkers"; and Car magazine ranked him the twenty-second most powerful person in the global automotive industry.
Amory Lovins talks about his latest book Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security, co-sponsored by the Pentagon. In it, Dr. Lovins lays out a strategy to reduce drastically America's foreign oil dependency over the coming decades. He explains how this can be done through the implementation of a combination of fuel efficiency and clean energy systems. He sets out an alternative business case for proseperous US automobile, truck and aircraft industries - one that will make the US more self-sufficient.
Americans have a choice, he says: either to import efficient cars to displace foreign oil, or to manufacture efficient cars themselves and import neither the oil nor the cars.Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, was established in 1982 by resource analysts L. Hunter Lovins and Amory B. Lovins. What began as a small group of colleagues focusing on energy policy has since grown into a broad-based institution with approximately forty full-time staff, an annual budget of nearly $6 million (over half of it earned through programmatic enterprise), and a global reach.
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