Physicist Amory Lovins (1947– ) is Cofounder (1982) and Chairman Emeritus of Rocky Mountain Institute, which he served as Chief Scientist 2007–19 and now supports as a contractor and Trustee; energy advisor to major firms and governments in 70+ countries for 45+ years; author of 31 books and more than 700 papers; and an integrative designer of superefficient buildings, factories, and vehicles.
He has received the Blue Planet, Volvo, Zayed, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, the MacArthur and Ashoka Fellowships, the Happold, Benjamin Franklin, and Spencer Hutchens Medals, 12 honorary doctorates, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood (“alternative Nobel”), National Design, and World Technology Awards. In 2016, the President of Germany awarded him the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse).
A Harvard and Oxford dropout and former Oxford don, he’s an honorary US architect, Swedish engineering academician, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK). He has taught at ten universities, most recently the Naval Postgraduate School (Professor of Practice 2011–17) and Stanford University, where he’s currently Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Scholar of the Precourt Institute for Energy—but only teaching topics he’s never formally studied, so as to retain beginner’s mind. He served in 2011–18 on the National Petroleum Council and has advised the US Departments of Energy and Defense.
Time has named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and Foreign Policy, one of the 100 top global thinkers. His latest books, mostly coauthored, include Natural Capitalism (1999, www.natcap.org), Small Is Profitable (2002, www.smallisprofitable.org), Winning the Oil Endgame (2004, www.oilendgame.com), The Essential Amory Lovins (2011), and Reinventing Fire (2011, www.reinventingfire.com).
His main recent efforts include supporting RMI’s collaborative synthesis, for China’s National Development and Reform Commission, of an ambitious efficiency-and-renewables trajectory that informed the 13th Five Year Plan; helping the Government of India design transformational mobility; and exploring how to make integrative design the new normal, so investments to energy efficiency can yield increasing rather than diminishing returns.
His avocations include fine-art mountain and landscape photography (www.judyhill.com), writing, music, linguistics, great-ape language and conservation, and Taoism.
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This decade China is set to regain the status it has held for 18 of the past 20 centuries: the world’s largest economy. A major engine of historic success was China’s inexorable drive to develop and deploy new technologies, far outpacing other civilizations. As Joseph Needham documented, and his student…
Readers of The Economist may have been surprised to read in its 26 July 2014 “Free exchange” section on page 63, or in its online version, the “clear” conclusion that solar and wind power are “the most expensive way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions,” while “nuclear plants…are cheaper,” so governments…
Japan thinks of itself as famously poor in energy, but this national identity rests on a semantic confusion. Japan is indeed poor in fossil fuels—but among all major industrial countries, it’s the richest in renewable energy like sun, wind, and geothermal. For example, Japan has nine times Germany’s renewable energy…
In 2014, Shell commissioned Amory Lovins to write a paper for its book “The Colors of Energy” [www.shell.com/colours] commemorating the centenary of Shell’s Amsterdam Technical Centre, then to present its thesis at the ceremony, where it was warmly received. Its thesis: energy efficiency is a huge, cheap, often expanding-returns, and…
During the first Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, economic growth and societal progress faced a problem of relative scarcity—not of resources, which were then considered inexhaustibly abundant, but of people. Making people (and the labor processes by which they manufactured goods and provided services) radically…
For the 2014 annual conference of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), Amory Lovins wrote a condensed, technical summary on Oil-Free Transportation.
Please find below a collection of Amory Lovins’ articles on Germany’s energy transition, organized from new to old. How Opposite Energy Policies Turned The Fukushima Disaster Into A Loss For Japan And A Win For Germany (Forbes, June 2014) Separating Fact from Fiction in Accounts of Germany’s Renewables Revolution (RMI…
To revitalize its economy and politics, Japan needs an efficiency-and-renewable-energy hiyaku that enables the new energy economy, not protects the old one. Japanese frogs jump too, says Bashō’s haiku “Furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto”. But we’re still waiting for mizu no oto.
Electricity is fundamental to the quality of modern life. It is a uniquely valuable, versatile, and controllable form of energy, which can perform many tasks efficiently. In little over 100 years electricity has transformed the ways Americans and most people of the world live. Lighting, refrigeration, electric motors, medical technologies,…
Adapted and updated from the noted 1999 essay “A Tale of Two Botanies.” (https://rmi.org/biotechnology/twobotanies.html) Amory Lovins’s Huffington Post invited commentary on some remarks by Dr. Craig Venter and summarizes the limitations and risks of genomics, transgenics, and artificial life.