Amory Lovins

Architect, Artist, Buddhist, Business mentor, Concerned citizen, Consultant, Designer, Educator/Teacher, Engineer, Entrepreneur, Environmentalist, Idea generator, Inventor, Musician, Photographer, Scientist, Social entrepreneur, Technologist, World traveler, Writer/Editor

Physicist Amory Lovins (1947– ) is Cofounder (1982) and Chairman Emeritus of Rocky Mountain Institute and its Chief Scientist 2007–19 (now an independent contractor); author of 31 books and over 700 papers; a designer of superefficient buildings, vehicles, and industrial plants; and for 47 years an advisor to major governments and firms worldwide on advanced energy efficiency and strategy. He received the Blue Planet, Volvo, Zayed, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, MacArthur and Ashoka Fellowships, 12 honorary doctorates, the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood, National Design, and World Technology Awards, and Germany’s Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit. A Harvard and Oxford dropout, former Oxford don, honorary US architect, Swedish engineering academician, and 2011–18 member of the US National Petroleum Council, he has taught at ten universities (most recently the US Naval Postgraduate School and Stanford, where he’s currently Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering). In 2009, Time named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and Foreign Policy, one of the 100 top global thinkers. He has published on climate change since 1968, most recently in two influential Environmental Research Letters papers—“How Big Is the Energy Efficiency Resource?” (Sep 2018, with video abstract) and “Recalibrating Climate Prospects” (Dec 2019). His latest papers are on speeding capital flight from fossil fuels (partly through integrative design for radical energy efficiency) and why the "harder-to-abate" sectors—heavy transport and industrial process heat—are not uniquely but only differently hard to decarbonize.

Applied hope. (See https://www.olin.edu/sites/default/files/olin_commencement_speech_2019_amory_b._lovins.pdf.) Integrative design. (See https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aad965, with 4-minute video abstract.)

Climate protection, done right, is not costly but profitable. Though the models that link climate science to consequences have conservatively understated the speed and runaway potential of climate change, they've at least equally understated the scope for mitigating climate change, especially through energy efficiency; thus the "race of our lives" (Jeremy Grantham) is very much on, and both despair and complacency are equally unwarranted. The world's oil and fossil-fuel use probably peaked in 2019. Hope is a stance, not an assessment (Frances Moore Lappé). To be truly radical is to make hope possible, not despair convincing (Raymond Williams).

Energy efficiency, and how integrative design can make it a severalfold larger and cheaper resource, often with increasing returns, Energy strategy and resilience, Energy's links to environment (including climate), security, development, resources, and economy, Nuclear nonproliferation, Renewable energy and its reliable integration into electric grids, Scale (what's the right size), Security (freedom from fear of privation or attack), Superefficient design of buildings, vehicles, factories, and equipment

I've given a couple of TED talks and a TEDx talk (though both my experiences with TEDx organizers were poor). Last I heard, I was listed as a top-100 TED presenter. My relationship with TED is friendly but distant. TED is not making good use of what I could offer.

Great-ape language Taoism Landscape photography Integration across ~20 disciplines