Amory Lovins Calls Al Gore A Total Moron

Well, indirectly. And the brainy environmentalist also claims that peak oil and global warming are irrelevant!

Saved money is earned money, which is why Lovins works with corporations to improve their bottom lines by radically improving energy efficiency with simple, and very available, technology and techniques. Once one company has converted, others follow.

In the case of Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world’s “demand pull” is inspiring its suppliers to improve their energy efficiency — by virtue of that age-old motivation, the economic survival instinct. In the case of microchip manufacturers, when one learns to make a chip more cheaply by saving energy in production, the others must follow.

Which is why peak oil doesn’t matter. If oil runs out next year, or in the next decade, that will matter less than the rise of competitive sources of energy in the marketplace. Petroleum will go the way of whale oil, which in 1850 was the world’s fifth largest industry, Lovins said. That powerful industry lasted precisely until coal-based oils provided a cheaper alternative to the common lighting fuel. You don’t hear much about whale oil anymore.

“Whalers were astounded,” Lovins said, “when they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales.”

He sees the same irrelevance in global warming, at least as a catalyst to inspire a change in the fuels burned by the world’s economic engine. He sees efforts to persuade federal governments and international bodies to set limits on carbon dioxide as misguided. China, currently the world’s top polluter of greenhouse gases, will persuade itself to go green because it makes economic sense, and provides a competitive advantage, he said.

Unless, that is, U.S. business, with a little help from Lovins, does first.

Source

The dirtiest, most polluted countries tend to be communist countries, and those with centrally planned economies. East Germany was the foul polluter of Europe before the liberation. North Korea is a nation-sized dead zone, and appears even worse when compared with capitalist South Korea. Lovins understands market forces far better than most people who call themselves environmentalists. Al Gore will never learn--perhaps because he stands to make billions of dollars leading the world's population down the carbon path.

My favourite environmentalists are Bjorn Lomborg and Patrick Moore, but Amory Lovins is another green-minded person who understands the central role of economics in caring for the earth.