by Cameron M. Burns
On 9–10 August 2007, RMI will celebrate its 25th anniversary (See: RMI25) and look forward to the next quarter century. Solutions asked the Institute’s cofounder Amory Lovins, a world-renowned experimental physicist, to reflect on the organization’s accomplishments, challenges, and future endeavors.
What impact has RMI had over the past 25 years?
More than we often realize or dared to hope. We’ve created much of the basic intellectual capital — in technology, policy, and business strategy — that underpins natural capitalism (www.naturalcapitalism.org), the energy and water efficiency revolutions, green real-estate development, renewable energy, Factor Ten engineering (www.10xe.org), and profitable solutions to the oil (www.oilendgame.com), climate, and nuclear proliferation problems. We’ve been a key driver in saving over half the oil and natural gas, a sixth of the electricity, and two-thirds of the water that the U.S. now uses per dollar of GDP (vs. 1975), and similarly in dozens of nations.
Our syntheses of new approaches to energy, cars, hydrogen, security, and several other fields are starting to be adopted. Our reframings — end-use/least-cost, the right size for the job, resilience — now inform many disciplines.
Hundreds of our alumni/ae are making important contributions. And thousands of people I meet all over the world say we’ve inspired them to rekindle hope and commit to action.
How would you contrast the issues and methods of RMI in its early years with the work it does now?
We’ve become more disciplined without losing our spark, more capable without losing our agility. We’ve gotten better at aikido politics, more astute about how to harness causality and influence, and far more deeply engaged with commerce as our prime instrument of outreach and effectiveness. Now we’re poised for a whole new level of effectiveness.
You often work until midnight and beyond. What keeps you going so vigorously after all these years?
My colleagues wind up the key every morning. I’m perpetually excited by the quality and dedication of our people and the size of our opportunities. What could I possibly be doing that’s more important, more urgent, or more fun?
I aspire to feel as Pablo Casals did when someone asked him, “Señor Casals, you’re the greatest cellist the world has ever known. You’re 92 years old. Still you practice six hours a day. Why do you do it?” He replied, “I think I detect signs of improvement.”
What are the major environmental challenges that RMI is best equipped to address?
RMI isn’t an environmental group, but creating abundance by design has profound environmental benefits. Probably 90 percent of the problems that U.S. EPA is supposed to worry about go away if energy, farming, and forestry are done right.
Just the advanced energy efficiency techniques we’ve developed can profitably stabilize the earth’s climate; so can the competitive “micropower” and other supply techniques we’ve fostered. Just our Hypercar®, vehicle-to-grid, and hydrogen-transition concepts can profitably resolve close to two-thirds of the climate problem. And from conventional air and water pollution to coal-stripping, from global poverty to geopolitical instability, many of the world’s toughest puzzles are unlocked by our versatile energy “master keys.”
Why are non-profits working in the energy and resources sectors so important?
The nonprofit sector is a very disproportionate source of social innovation — though less so now that most foundations support only specific agendas with precooked outcomes, not exploratory research. Nonprofits attract grants and donations aimed at making the world better and safer, plus unusually devoted, visionary, and imaginative people. I think this is because nonprofits can sustain a social purpose and a long view that seldom flourish in the marketplace.
Yet RMI has been able to meld these attributes with disciplined business management, visionary leadership, and powerful business partners who execute our mission for their own purposes. Moreover, RMI has been able (though often by slim margins) to fund its innovations as an entrepreneurial nonprofit, using eleven different revenue models so far, ten of them entrepreneurial, and getting most of its revenue from programmatic enterprise. Our main challenge now is to capitalize rapid capacity-building so we can meet the explosively growing demands the world is placing on us. Our time has come, and we need to step up.
What do you see as the best strategy RMI can undertake to ensure that its ideas go to scale in the market?
So far we’ve implemented our efficiency concepts mainly by helping early private-sector adopters succeed so conspicuously that their rivals are forced by competitive pressure to follow suit or lose share. We’ve begun to use the “demand pull” of huge organizations like Wal-Mart and News Corporation to change wider market behavior. We’ve begun to get better at injecting new business models into troubled industries at critical moments, to practice institutional acupuncture, and to inform the enormously powerful private capital market. But we’re always seeking more and better trimtabs.
Our biggest puzzle is how to make natural capitalism (www.naturalcapitalism.org) into a beneficial social virus that propagates itself exponentially with network mathematics, rather than our having to introduce it to one company at a time, which works well but isn’t fast enough.
What has personally given you the most satisfaction at RMI?
The growing evidence that our people, ideas, partners, and practical accomplishments have really helped, and are laying the foundations for far greater progress by our peers and successors.
What do you hope to accomplish during the next 5–10 years?
I’d like us to help bring the Hypercar revolution to fruition; set the United States, then others, irreversibly on the journey beyond oil (we’ve already passed the tipping point in three or four of the necessary six sectors) and beyond coal; help drive the integrative-design and biomimicry revolutions; embed in dominant public and private policy the enormous opportunities for profitable climate stabilization, focusing especially on cities; and continue the military’s transition to a “new strategic triad” that integrates conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and nonprovocative defense.
And I’d like RMI to keep learning, stay humble, and not take itself too seriously.
At a personal level, I want to get back in shape and spend more time in the mountains, making more beautiful new photographs with Judy, and to do more music.
What’s your wildest project so far?
Helping design a new house for some much higher primates — talking bonobos and signing orangutans — with them on the team, because you can ask them what they want and they tell you (See: Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary, www.IowaGreatApes.org). Interspecies design is quite a trip (see RMI Solutions, Summer 2003). I’m happy to report there is intelligent life on earth. Sorry it’s not us, but the search continues, and is starting to turn up some promising specimens…some of them brachiating around our passive-solar banana farm in the Rockies!
Editor’s note: We asked his new bride, noted photographer Judy Hill (
www.judyhill.com), to make some portraits of Amory during their recent visit to New York City’s Central Park. We are pleased that one of her photographs graces the cover of the newly
redesigned RMI Solutions.
