Amory Lovins
Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel?
In this commentary in The Wall Street Journal, Amory Lovins responds to the Department of the Interior’s proposals to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Instead of drilling for oil, the federal government could place higher efficiency standards on automobiles and buildings. Efficiency measures such as these…
Origins of the Nuclear Power Fiasco
This chapter is excerpted from the book, Energy Policy Studies. In the chapter, Amory Lovins argues that the use of nuclear power in the United States is a fiasco. He outlines the series of structural and conceptual errors by the government that resulted in failure in the utility industry, extreme…
Real Security
This article is a summary of Amory and Hunter Lovins’ book, Brittle Power. The book argues that energy policy creates enormous security risks, primarily through overcentralization and technological misapplication. They show that national energy policy all too often undermines military policy and national security. This article details the security benefits…
The Fragility of Domestic Energy
In this classic article from 1983, Amory Lovins questions the reliability of America’s domestic energy supply. Domestic energy sources seem to be the answer to the fragility of an energy supply that comes mainly from international sources. However, Lovins argues that most domestic sources are also centralized, and hence vulnerable…
Brittle Power
Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security, prepared for the Pentagon in 1981, was the first and remains the definitive unclassified treatise on the vulnerability of energy critical infrastructure. It also synthesizes from engineering and biology how to redesign energy systems to be resilient, so that major failures, now inevitable,…