General
If Customers Save Electricity, Must Rates Rise?
In this paper from 1988, Amory Lovins uses examples to show that if utility customers take measures to save electricity, utilities can still make profits without raising electricity rates.
Energy: The Avoidable Oil Crisis
This article, published after the oil shocks of the 1970s, details strategies for reducing oil shortages and keeping costs low, thereby preventing another oil crisis. The authors see three possible strategies for responding to oil shocks: protectionism, trade, and substitution. While they explain how each of these strategies could help…
Nuclear Follies
This unpublished letter to Forbes responded to James Cook’s famous cover-story article of the same name about what the magazine called “the largest managerial disaster in business history.” A quarter-century later, the disaster continues to unfold just as the letter foresaw.”…
Reducing Vulnerability: The Energy Jugular
This chapter of the book, Nuclear Arms: Ethics, Strategy, Politics, details America’s energy security vulnerability. America’s energy system contains multiple causes of energy insecurity: complexity (because the causes of failure are impossible to foresee), control and synchronism, hazardous fuels, inflexibility and interdependence, specialized requirements, and difficulty of repair. There are…
Peddling Nuclear Power: An Explosive U.S. Policy
This piece, originally published in The Los Angeles Times, addresses the nuclear nonproliferation policy of the Reagan administration. The authors argue that the policy had the unintended consequence of spreading nuclear bombs, subverting genuine nonproliferation progress, destabilizing allied governments, raising energy prices, and prolonging dependence on foreign oil. They argue…