Article in college paper on Amory Lovins

Consumer. Consumer…Arrgh!  [note: this was before the pirate "arrgh!" craze]

Lately I’ve been wondering whether I like being called a consumer. I never gave the idea much thought until I read an excerpt from The Strawberry Statement by James Simon Kunen in which he enumerates some of the things he doesn’t like: “calling people consumers” is something he doesn’t like. (Or I should say, didn’t like in 1968, when he wrote the book.) Then I began thinking about the word itself. Consumer. Consumer . . . Arrgh! I don’t like it! A vacuum cleaner consumes! A garbage disposal consumes! But it’s true: people also are consumers.

Our system of buying and selling is based on mass production and mass consumption. If you don’t want to be a consumer you can drop out of the system. Get some land, grow your own food, barter your handmade tapestries. You are going against the grain, though, and that’s not easy—you still have property taxes to worry about for one thing. The system won’t accommodate you; it’s much too inflexible, and many of the sources of production are too far removed, too conglomerated, to provide anything except the large-scale, lock-step service designed to bear the greatest amount of traffic.

Thus most of us are consumers by default: we fail to try anything that isn’t already systematic. But by what other means does one raise a family? The picture isn’t entirely gloomy, of course, because there are some advantages. The convenience of it all is the greatest advantage and is actually at the root of the whole system. If you can do all your shopping at Skaggs-Albertson’s you don’t need the grocer on the corner or the drugstore down the street. You can load up your car (another convenience) with all you need by making one stop. But the convenience breeds a certain habit, and the habit determines what kind of consumers we are. What kind of consumers we are determines . . . well that’s something to think about.

Energy consumption is something else to think about: “The energy in one U.S. gallon of oil is equivalent to one and a half weeks of a fine diet of 3,000 food calories per day (more than most of the world’s people get). The gallon lasts less than ten minutes in a fast car. A Concorde SST consumes it in about a tenth of a second. Millennia were consumed in putting the gallon together.”

It’s obvious that Amory Lovins, who put those words together in his 1975 book World Energy Strategies, is thinking about energy consumption. He is not painting the gloomy picture, however, like so many others, some of whom are trying to gently but firmly coerce the public into thinking that new power plants must be built without hesitation in order to supply the increasing energy needs of our society.

Perhaps you have wondered why energy usage must so inevitably increase. Isn’t conservation capable of holding the line on energy consumption?

That question has been exhaustively studied and the result is central to the idea of using alternative energy sources: zero increase in the rate of energy consumption is feasible—in fact a decrease in energy consumption is possible. Whether or not it’s desirable depends on who you ask about it.

Lovins talked about his ideas at the Old State House in Little Rock last month. About 150 people attended his lecture. Among his statistics, which were plentiful and thought-provoking, was a chart showing how government and industry had, over the last few years, lowered their predictions of future energy usage. Lovins called the chart a diagonal matrix because his predictions from several years ago, in the upper left of the chart, agreed precisely with the most recent predictions of government and industry, shown in the lower right. In other words, as time has passed even the most vested of vested interests have concluded that energy consumption isn’t going to increase as rampantly as they once thought it would. But they are not very eager to let the public know this.

At this point a little information on Amory Lovins himself is appropriate: He is a 27-year-old physicist, an American living in England, working as the chief British representative of Friends of the Earth International. He looks sort of like a scaled-down version of Isaac Asimov—smaller but with the same wiry hair, same black-framed eyeglasses, and behind the glasses the same rather wild, electric look in the eyes. His ideas, however, are far from being wild, although they certainly go beyond more conventional thinking.

Lovins wants to convince people that alternative energy sources will not only work, they will also provide a significant improvement over the present system. He claims the “soft path” of solar energy, wind energy and other diverse non-extinguishable sources of energy, “each doing what it does best and none of which is a panacea,” will ultimately be less expensive than coal, oil and nuclear energy. Government subsidies, he pointed out, make these conventional forms of energy seem cheaper than they really are. In an interview published August 20 in the Arkansas Gazette, Lovins says the subsidies should be abolished and low-interest loans from large holders of capital should be made available to help people finance insulation and solar collectors for homes and businesses.

In his speech Lovins called the soft path “a hopeful alternative to the energy future” and said it would “have no effects on the life-style” of people in the affluent Western nations.

One aspect of the soft path is a decentralization of power production, resulting in energy sources being better suited to a particular requirement. Solar energy, for instance, is well suited for heating—water heating and space heating. The latter of these accounts for 58% of the energy usage in the United States. When electric power from a steam generating plant is used for space heating, it’s like “using a forest fire to fry an egg,” Lovins said.

He also mentioned other problems with coal and nuclear power plants: environmental damage, including “zones of national sacrifice,” such as Appalachia, where coal is mined and used for energy in far away cities, and also places where highly radioactive nuclear by-products would be cached; the political problems created by allocating considerable sums of money to meet capital demands of large power plant construction; and the tendency to form an “elitist technocracy.”

Conservation is a key ingredient in the soft approach to solving energy problems. Of course, we are already being urged to conserve energy, but if we do a really good job of it, what happens? The electric rates go up, for one thing—the company must make a profit. So with respect to the present state of affairs, a little conservation is beneficial, but it’s hazardous to the economy to do a lot of conserving.

Again there is the alternative of dropping out of the system, although that means losing the conveniences and changing habits. (However, it also means gaining some independence from rising utility costs.) Lovins approach is to initiate a new system, one that is not so far removed from the user, nor too conglomerated. Whether or not that system can be implemented depends on whether people are going to be insatiable consumers or sensible individuals.

      --David Trulock, in The College Profile, Hendrix College’s student newspaper, December 8, 1978, page 6. Lovins is now director of The Rocky Mountain Institute. Peace.