Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
NEGAWATTS, HYPERCARS, AND NATURAL CAPITALISM
AMORY LOVINS
This being a publication of the Smithsonian Institution, I will start with a
little history. For many of us, a lot of the history of ideas about what to do
about energy, not a new problem in society, starts rather recently.You could
take it much further back. There are many examples of technical fixes for
energy shortages, such as in Sweden in 1767, when they were running out
of firewood and the king commissioned Baron Carl Johan Cronstedt to
develop a double-efficiency stove. Baron Cronstedt, an architect, enlisted
the help of Baron Fabian Wrede, who was experienced in stove design.
Together they devised a double-efficiency stove, and the king then decreed
that everybody would use it.That was the end of the firewood shortage.
But in the United States, we first had to get over some mistakes in think-
ing about what the problem is. I had an article in
Foreign Affairs
in 1976 that
started with the conventional view of what the energy future of the United
States would look like over the next 50 years (figure 1). According to that
view, we would use depletable fuels faster and faster, convert them in ever
larger, more complex, more centralized plants into premium forms, mainly
electricity, and subsidize them enough that the high cost of those new sup-
plies would not depress demand below the projected level. Now, there are
a lot of reasons that future did not happen. It was too slow, too costly, and
too disagreeable. But along the way we redefined the energy problem. My
article suggested what is now called the end-use least-cost approach, which
asks a different question and therefore gets a different answer.
The question had been assumed to be “Where can we get more energy,
of any kind, from any source, at any price?” But it made more sense to start
by asking “What do we want this stuff for in the first place?” People do not,
in general, want lumps of coal or barrels of sticky black goo. They want
instead the services that energy provides: hot showers, cold beer, mobility,
