THE BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ENERGY - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 10

Lovins and his acolytes did not just claim that the sot energy path
was bet er than the hard one; they insisted that the United States faced
a stark choice. Introducing a concept that would later become a touch-
point for advocates of another energy transformation, Lovins warned
of lock-in: “Because commitment to the [hard path] may foreclose the
[sot path], we must soon choose one or the other.” h e country, the
Atlantic Monthly explained, “lacks the material and spiritual resources
to follow both.”
On this point, his critics were largely in agreement. h ose i rms
responsible for the bulk of the existing energy system warned that rapid
transformation was unrealistic. In one ad in the New York Times , Mobil
cautioned against pushing too hard and fast on alternative energy: “You
can't make a baby in a month,” they explained, “by making nine women
pregnant. ” 17 Exxon, then as now the largest oil company in the country,
took out ads in the New York Times , Newsweek , and elsewhere: “EXXON
ANSWERS QUESTIONS ABOUT ONE OF THE NEWEST ENERGY
SOURCES UNDER THE SUN—THE SUN!” read one headline . 18 Many
people didn't like the ads' answers. Senator Gary Hart and Representative
Richard Ot inger would write to Exxon, asserting that it had “misinformed
the public” with advertisements “riddled with inaccurate statistics and
pessimistic projections about solar power.” h e oil company, which had
invested substantially in solar itself, naturally disagreed . 19
h e two sides in the bat le—one favoring traditional fossil fuels (ot en
along with nuclear), the other emphasizing conservation and alterna-
tives—were not the only elements having parallels today. Much about
the world in which the energy debates were unfolding was similar, too.
h en as now, Americans were searching simultaneously for footings on
multiple fronts. A changing economy—the 1970s saw the i rst real wave
of postwar globalization—forced Americans to rethink how they would
live. A shit ing security landscape—then, Vietnam and the apparent
resurgence of the Soviet Union; today, terrorism, instability in the Middle
East, and the rise of China—made them question their role in the world.
New environmental threats also i gured prominently: a massive oil spill
of the coast of Santa Barbara galvanized the environmental movement
in 1969, and the 1972 book h e Limits to Growth , which would sell mil-
lions of copies, warned that the world would quickly run out of natural