[00:00:00] Speaker A: You good planets are hard to find out. Temperate stones and tropic climbs and thriving seas, winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah, good.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Hello k squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly casequid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronie Lipschitz. Energy has been with us for a long time, and over the past 100 years, fossil fuels have been cheap and plentiful. Indeed, contemporary industrial society would not have been possible without them. But now we're going to have to pay the piper if we want to limit the future impacts of climate change. How could that happen, and what can we do? My guest today is Amory Lovins, cofounder and chairman emeritus of the Rocky Mountain Institute and longtime Energy Futurist. Lovins has long been prominent in the field of transitions from centralized corporate energy systems to renewable, decentralized ones. Almost 50 years ago, during the so called energy crisis of the 1970s, Lovins published a groundbreaking article in the journal Foreign affairs entitled energy Strategy the road not Taken. In that article, he made the then heretical case for a renewable based strategy over one based on oil, coal and nuclear power. Surely but slowly, his vision is being realized, albeit in a much more lengthy, complicated, and conflicted fashion. Amory served as the institute's chief scientist from 2007 through 2019, and he now supports it as a contractor and trustee. Over the past half century, he has been energy advisor to major firms and governments in more than 70 countries. He's the author of 31 books and more than 850 papers, and he advocates for integrative design of super efficient buildings, factories and vehicles.
Amory Lovins, it's my great pleasure to welcome you to sustainability now.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: So why don't we start at a broad level? What does the world's energy future look like today? And what do you see? The relative roles of efficiency, integrative design, renewables, and the sort of traditional fuels in all of this.
[00:02:43] Speaker C: About almost four fifths of the world's energy comes from burning the rotted remains of primeval swamp goo and dinosaur poop. But we now have better alternatives. It's now considerably cheaper to use renewable sources, notably solar and wind, which are growing incredibly quickly and will gradually take over not just the power sector, where they're already renewables are already probably around 90% of net new capacity added, but also heat and mobility. The other two big uses. And we are right around now in this tipping point where efficiency is chipping away at total energy use and renewables are displacing fossil fuels with increasing speed worldwide. That is why, for example, last year, us carbon emissions declined almost 2%, even though the economy grew robustly. And we're headed for more and more of the same. So we're now in this decade of kind of bumpy plateau where fossil fuel use occasionally might go up or down, but it's starting to drift down. Carbon emissions have been roughly stable for a decade worldwide. And as the decade goes on, just starting over the next few years, probably starting right around last year, this year, the fossil fuels will tip into decline, squeezed from both sides. So the energy world is undergoing its biggest change since we started using fossil fuels. And altogether, the change in the energy system is probably the biggest technology change humans have experienced since the invention of agriculture. But it's hard to tell when you're in it. Like the fish doesn't know it's in the water.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Well, I think that your article 45 years ago, right, basically proposed all of this, but it seems to have taken much longer than we anticipated at the time. Right.
[00:05:14] Speaker C: Are pretty much on schedule. The renewables were delayed several decades by hostile policy.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: We thought logic and rationality could speed up this transition. And I think discounted politics and resistance. Do you think that this is going to require significant state intervention or it will just basically proceed by the logic of.
[00:05:38] Speaker C: Well, we already have significant state intervention. Many trillions of dollars a year go to subsidize fossil fuels.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. But I'm thinking about renewables now, right? About that particular.
[00:05:49] Speaker C: Well, we don't have a free market in energy.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:05:53] Speaker C: We'd probably be better off if we did. But any kind of energy use or production is hemmed in by lots of regulations, of which the most important ones in the US are actually not national, but state and local. Gradually we're realizing several things are going on that aren't entirely obvious. Most states still reward gas and electric utilities for selling you more energy and penalize them for cutting your bill. So that's the perverse regulation that needs to be fixed, as others have fixed. There are a lot of restrictions on what you can build where, and that applies to some degree to fossil fuels, but they typically get their way. Some pipeline and other projects, though, are being blocked as regulators realize that they don't have to do what a dwindling industry wants them to and may even bribe them to or influence them to. And meanwhile, the fossil fuel industries the incumbents and the nuclear industry are busy trying to stop their competitors. So there are a lot of fake astroturf organizations claiming to be environmental and other grassroots seeming efforts that try to block, for example, solar and wind power in rural areas all over the United States. Most people haven't quite realized this is going on yet, but we notice, for example, in Australia there's a reported syndrome of people getting nauseated or having other medical symptoms if there's a wind machine nearby. This condition is spread by word of mouth. It shows up communities where lobbyists and influencers from the coal industry have been, but not where they haven't been. Even though the conditions are otherwise very similar. Lies can spread.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: I don't know if California is a special case, but since I live in California, I think of it as a special case and the state has set itself on the road to total electrification with renewables by 2045. Does this seem feasible at this point?
[00:08:08] Speaker C: It's perfectly feasible, and it will save money and increase energy security and help combat climate change. So it's a good thing. It's therefore all the more inexplicable that the state public utility Commission has just gutted their previous rules that encouraged rooftop solar power. And we're all trying to figure out why on earth would they do that.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Well, I've been propagating the idea that authorities are terrified of a third PG e bankruptcy and that they are seeing know the renewable model as essentially undermining the utility grid model.
It sounds like a conspiracy, but we know what could happen with the bankruptcy.
[00:08:53] Speaker C: Starting a few years ago on us average, lots of differences in localities, but on average it costs more to buy your household electricity from the grid than to get it off your solar panels on your roof. And that gap continues to widen as PG and E's prices soar. Now, of course, the first time they diverged radically from national patterns was around 2000 2001, when a very ideological PUC decided to change the basic rules so that utilities like PG E and private generators, merchant generators, didn't get rewarded the way they used to. In fact, the way to make more money if you were a merchant generator, would be to withhold supply and create a shortage and boost the price. So that's exactly what they did. They followed the new rules exactly and created a power shortage despite abundant supply. So that was very expensive to get out of that mess. And a lot of the rate hikes of that period lasted a long time just to pay off the obligations incurred to keep the lights on in an artificial shortage. It's a little more mysterious. What's going on now?
PG E is of course trying to underground a lot of lines to reduce fire risk and so on. But they're very scared of more people getting rooftop solar and not needing wires in the first place, right? Well, some of us have been trying to tell them that for decades and there are ways they could change their business model to reduce the risk of being displaced in that way. But they haven't seemed very interested and they have a pretty sweet deal so far. The commission has given them very large rate hikes when asked, and they get paid for investing money rather than providing better service, at least cost.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: A lot of the money is going into grid hardening. And I actually looked at my electricity bill the other day for the first time in years. And transmission and distribution seem to be at least half or more of the cost, right? So I mean, that's where PG E's business is. And if distributed energy resources become widespread, that whole business element disappears, right?
[00:11:26] Speaker C: Sure. That's why the community aggregators are doing very well. We're allowed to compete, and I think that's a widespread and inevitable pattern. Of course, what you're seeing with rooftop solar is just one kind of competition. Another one is people are using electricity more efficiently. And California has long been a leader in doing that. It was one of the first states to change the rules so that utilities in principle would not get rewarded for selling more energy, but rather for cutting your bill. That's a good thing. Trouble is, they still get rewarded for spending money, whether it's a wise expenditure or not. And indeed, investing more in efficiency and self generation on your side of the meter is probably cheaper than continuing to run the existing system and underground, or strengthen the wires.
Some transmission and distribution upgrades are certainly called for, but I think there's a serious question whether everything proposed is really the best buy.
[00:12:41] Speaker B: Well, I mean, as we know, again, going back to the logic and rationality, right, there are lots of vested and embedded interests that aren't looking necessarily at the bottom line, but at protecting the structure.
[00:12:55] Speaker C: And if you compare, say, PG E's electricity prices with those of smud or other publicly owned utilities all around the state, you see factor two or so. Even though they face broadly similar wholesale market conditions, the public utilities do get somewhat cheaper capital, but I think they're a lot better run.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: One of the things that's happened through the PUC is that the utilities, the private utilities, have essentially captured community energy know, microgrid kinds of systems that basically you can only develop and build one if the utility is in control of.
[00:13:36] Speaker C: It, manages it, which starts defeat purpose. One would like to be coordinated, but if you're trying to get out from some of a utility that charges more than it should and may deliver less than it should, often very old infrastructure, why would you give them control of the alternative?
[00:13:54] Speaker B: Well, once again, if it becomes possible to build community based energy systems, defection from the grid by various communities looks more feasible. And again, I don't want to be sort of conspiracy minded, but it seems to me that's the most parsimonious explanation of this.
[00:14:14] Speaker C: Well, and indeed, at the way the rates are going up, people may not want to stay on the grid. There's no law that says you have to buy electricity from somebody else, and batteries are getting cheap enough now, and solar cells, that some people may decide that there's no real reason to stick with PG e unless you really are fond of them, and not many are. I say this as a former longtime PG e consultant, I'm very sad at where the company's gone.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. My name is Ronnie Lipschitz, and I am interviewing Amory Lovins today, co founder and chairman emeritus of the Rocky Mountain Institute and longtime energy futurist, and we've just been talking know what's the matter with PG E? Let me ask you a slightly different.
[00:15:09] Speaker C: Question, and I should clarify. I'm not here on behalf of.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: No, these are your own views. No, I understand that. Does 100% electrification make sense? People have argued that that last 5% or 10% might be so expensive, and that we should retain some kind of backup just for contingencies. Maybe this is not a current talking.
[00:15:33] Speaker C: About is not electrification 90 versus 100%, but renewable 90 versus 100%. But actually there's a similar. Well, let me go back to the electrification question. There are some uses where electrification probably is not the best answer, the most obvious being passive and solar heating of buildings. Mine, I mean, behind me is a passive solar banana farm. We're ripening crop number 81 right now with no furnace, high in the Rockies, near Aspen, where it used to go to -47 f on occasion. And it's actually cheaper to build that way because even 40 years ago you saved more money leaving out the heating system than you paid extra for the things that got rid of the heating system, basically insulation and windows. And the same thing is true in not just buildings but also vehicles and factories. There are some, especially heat applications that are probably cheaper to do without electricity. Perhaps you're using geothermal heat directly rather than making power out of it and so on. So 100% electrification is a bit exaggerated, but certainly most uses should go electric. And you can even buy a little fist size heat pump now in Switzerland that gives you six to 15 units of hot water from one unit of electricity. That's incredibly efficient. We have very efficient processes emerging, even for making stuff like steel. Normally people say, well, we need to have a great deal of wind and solar electricity to make green hydrogen, to make green steel. But there's an indian entrepreneur in Boulder who will know within months whether he can scale up, as it looks like, an electrochemical process for making iron. That's about 90% of the energy in steel making.
And you could start with high grade iron ore. You can start with ferrous dirt and get out of it every metal in there at 1400, 600 degrees c, but roughly 65 c, which is the temperature of a hot cup of coffee. And there are similarly alternatives for cement. And by the way, we can save half the steel and cement, which together release 15% of the co2 by better structural design.
That's an option most people don't even think about.
Like half the weight of a typical mid or high rise building is the floor slabs. Not even counting the extra structure. Hold up those heavy floor slabs.
In a typical building like that, the floor slab is pretty thick reinforced concrete, but you can make it only about this thick, save three quarters of the cement and all the steel just by making it corrugated like cardboard. By the way, once you have those thinner floor slabs, by that or a vaulted dome method, you can put three stories in the vertical space of two without reducing the ceiling height. Very interesting. 55% more net readable space builds faster and cheaper. Why would you do it any other way? Once you realize that? So there's a lot of design we haven't done yet that can profoundly reduce our needs for electricity and all other forms of energy.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: I'd like to get back to this to integrative design that question, but I want to just first ask you this. I was recently contacted by a speaker's bureau, in fact, I think, in Colorado, offering a guest to talk how costly it was to electrify her condo.
And this was an organization which I guess is sort of astroturfy.
[00:19:47] Speaker C: Sounds like it might be the natural gas, or as we now call it, methane gas industry.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: It might have been, but that's actually not my question. My question is, consumers have very high discount rates, right? I mean, this is one of the issues that we continually run into, is that for a lot of people, spending capital now does not make sense, even if you're going to save that in.
[00:20:14] Speaker C: The future because you have a very high time value of money.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: Right.
How do we deal with that? That's really beliefs and practices as opposed to economics per se.
[00:20:30] Speaker C: Well, this is not an economic but a financial problem. Okay? And it's very similar to if a more efficient car cost more, which it increasingly no longer does with electric cars, but it did, as it certainly used to. That would hold many people back. Albuquerque rich basically from buying a very efficient car. However, about eight countries do what's called a feebate. So when you buy a new car, you pay a fee or get a rebate. And which and how big depends on how efficient it is compared, for example, to cars of that general type and size in that year. And the fees can pay for the rebate. So it's revenue neutral. It's not a new tax, it doesn't change government revenues, but it lets you buy your car using the same time value of money, the same discount rate that society does, which is much, much lower than what most of us have to use. And this turns out to have quite a dramatic effect on which cars people buy.
That sort of mechanism can be used for saving energy in other uses than cars. Or you could do it by regulation. Like Washington state just changed the building code to compare gas and electric uses, like heating your house, not back at a power plant or a gas plant or something, but at the site boundary of your property.
And if you calculate it that way, the electricity is revealed as a much better deal with a good heat pump and of course, lots of insulation. So you would do that instead.
And that is actually then enforced under the building code. So it isn't a choice completely unconstrained, the state is instead helping you choose. The best buy also happens to have a lot of societal benefits, just like switching from a gas stove to efficient electric. Cooking is very good for your health as well as saving money in most circumstances. Oh, and by the way, I have an experimental stove that's several times more efficient than the most efficient conventional electric cooking system.
There's only about 100 copies in the world. It's not yet on the market, but I hope it will be.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: Why don't you describe that for us? I saw that in your video and I'm just curious.
[00:23:12] Speaker C: Well, it's a swiss system that combines vacuum insulated pots, engineering the pot so the bottom stays perfectly flat as it heats up instead of warping, and therefore it stays in perfect contact all over with a ceramic hob which is heated resistively from underneath by smart power electronics that only put a one or two second pulse of heat into each hob as needed to maintain the temperature you want. So only one hob runs at a time. So if you're off grid, you can have a smaller inverter in your solar system, and there's a smart sensor that you can put software in it that would let it calculate how much energy to put into the pot in order to get the food to the temperature you want and no more, and hold it there for the time you set. It's just a much smarter system. And by the way, there's a type of oven invented at purdue in the 70s called a biradian oven, that's two or three times more efficient than a standard oven. So if somebody would put that on the market and you combined it with this super efficient cooktop, you could run all of your cooking on a standard 30 amp, 117 volts circuit and not need to rewire your house for 240 volts, which may be what put up the costs of the lady that wanted to interview with you.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I turned down the interview. In any event, tell us about energy efficiency.
How much potential does there continue to be in reducing energy consumption and electricity consumption?
[00:25:07] Speaker C: Well, energy overall. The conventional number is that over the next few decades, we will at least double global energy efficiency, which we've already done since the mid seventy s. And in the US, we've saved about 62% of the energy we would have been using today if we were still as inefficient as we were in 1975. But producing today's economy now, those numbers are very conservative because there are smarter ways to do efficiency than are normally counted. So I mentioned how in this building, the elimination of the heating system slightly reduced construction cost.
And this helped inspire the german passive house movement. And there are now at least hundreds of thousands of buildings in Europe that need no, or almost no heat, but have roughly normal construction cost. And in fact, RMI's office building down the road in basalt here in western Colorado, does the same thing. So, no mechanical systems except ventilation, heat recovery, passive heating, and a net exporter of solar electricity with good economics. Now, I mentioned earlier, the same principles can apply in other uses than buildings. So, for example, out in the driveway, I've got a BMW I three car, of which BMW profitably sold a quarter million. And it's made of carbon fiber, which was thought to be hopelessly expensive.
But it turns out when you make the car out of carbon fiber, it gets 600 od pounds lighter so you need fewer batteries to move it for the same range. Batteries are the most expensive part of an electric car, and also it's radically simpler to manufacture the car. So for those reasons, it ends up at a competitive price, but with four times the efficiency of what you started with. Or if you go back in our utility room, you'll see that we added some pipes to take some extra active solar heat from our hot water system and put it into radiant slab coils I put in in 1983 in case we might ever need them to replace the last 1% of our space heat. That was coming from wood stoves. And of course, my favorite fuel is to burn obsolete energy studies because those are very abundant.
[00:27:43] Speaker B: There are a lot of those, yeah.
[00:27:46] Speaker C: So how do we move the hot water around to replace the wood stoves? Well, normally our master plumber would do what he first thought of, which is seven pumps totaling over 2300 watts of pumping power. We ended up doing it with one pump, maximum 43 watts. That's 97% less.
We made the pipes fat, short and straight, instead of skinny, long, and crooked. And that got rid of almost all the friction. And if everybody did that with pipes and ducts worldwide, the realm of plumbers and pipe fitters and sheet metal workers, you would save about a fifth of the world's electricity, or half the coal fired electricity, and you'd get your money back, typically in less than a year in fixing old stuff, or immediately if you're building something new. And yet, that practice is not yet in any standard engineering textbook, any course I know of, except the one that a colleague and I teach at Stanford. It's not in any government study or industry forecast or climate model. Why not? Oh, because it's not a technology, it's a design method. And not many people yet think of design as a way to scale rapid change, but it's at least as important as technology.
And therefore the standard observation that half the past decarbonization in the world has come from more efficient energy use, and at least half the future decarbonization will, too. I think that future part is very conservative. We could save a good deal more than that and save even more money. And of course, when we need less energy, that means that the renewables we're building so rapidly can displace more fossil fuel sooner and reduce climate risk while we save more money.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: I want to come back to that point you just made, basically about design and non technological methods, because that's one that interests me greatly. You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host Ronie Lipschitz. And my guest today is Amory Lovins. And we are just now talking about non technological approaches to energy efficiency. Amory, you're a big advocate of integrative.
You know, I also know that there is a lot of interest in user centered design, which is not exactly the same. But what you're talking about is the fact that architects, mechanical engineers and so on have very embedded ways of thinking about systems and designing them. And of course, building codes and probably various other kinds of regulations are quite fixed on these sorts of conventional approaches. So we're really talking in a way about, I guess, institutional change.
What are your thoughts about that? How do you go about getting your argument about reduced friction in pipes, let's say, into the pipeline, into the design pipeline?
[00:31:04] Speaker C: Well, one nice thing about integrative design is you don't have to go back to school and learn new theory to do it. If you just see a picture of it or hear it described, that may be enough.
I think if we could fill the social media with pictures of great pipe layout, a lot of plumbers and pipe fitters would say, boy, that looks weird, but look at the benefits. I could provide much better value. I could distinguish myself in a crowded market.
And, in fact, I'm finishing up now a technical monograph with lots of pretty pictures that will start in China and India. We're very active in both promoting energy efficiency and renewables. And that, I think, will cause some chief engineers of a bunch of companies to look at the pictures and say, wait a minute, you're saving 90 od percent of the pump and fan energy and a lot of investment. I'm going to try that. I could be a hero. And competition will then do the rest of the job. If, of course, the building codes allow you to do it, many do require that pipes be all dressed in neat right angles, like they teach you in trade school.
Why? Because it's easy to draw, but we don't draw it anymore. The computer does that. And even the CAD programs that do the drawing in the computer often do not allow you to run the pipe diagonally or in a curve.
It's really remarkable how simple things like that can hold us back from enormous benefits.
[00:32:54] Speaker B: I see here a potential for a.
[00:32:56] Speaker C: Video game, basically, there are a lot of ways to spread this sort of thing, but it could be viral and images, and I think it would be nice to change a bunch of codes. We have thousands of building codes just in the United States.
They're very slow to change, but usually they don't prohibit you from doing something smarter. And if they do, if you have a smart business inspector or building inspector, and you treat that person with respect and have a useful conversation about public benefit, you can probably get permission to do it.
Not always. When we were doing this house with no heating system, the Inspector was rather surprised when he couldn't see a furnace on the drawings, I bet, and said, you got to have a furnace. I said, where are the four building codes that say, I have to have a furnace? He said, well, right here it says you got 18 inches off the floor on the design day, the coldest day. You have to be able to maintain this 70 od degrees. I said, oh, well, here's a sealed engineering calculation saying it'll do that. Is that okay? He said, yeah, my rear end is covered.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, look, tell us about integrative design. Define it as you articulate it.
[00:34:24] Speaker C: All right. Design is a proven way to design anything that uses energy, water, resources as a whole system for multiple benefits, rather than as a pile of little isolated parts. So, for example, behind me is a white arch that holds up the middle of my house. It actually does twelve different things, but it has only one cost.
This is a much more fun way to design.
You're not trying to do just one thing, and once you get in the habit, you wouldn't do it any other way. We take a lot of Stanford students, not just engineering students, but students in law, business, chinese, art history, sociology, psychology, you name it. And by the end of about nine, what we call puzlers, little design exercises of stuff they never thought of before.
They're good at it, and they could go out and be integrative designers.
It's perfectly teachable. We teach it to the great architects and engineers that we work with. Well, so far on $60 billion worth of industrial designs and over 1000 buildings, and we haven't had a case yet where somebody doesn't get it and can't do it.
[00:35:48] Speaker B: That's encouraging.
[00:35:49] Speaker C: We're used to technological revolutions.
This one's between the ears. It's about how we apply different or ask different questions in a different order. We're using orthodox engineering principles, but we're framing the problem differently. And of course, once you state the problem correctly, the answer becomes self evident.
[00:36:13] Speaker B: I would venture to guess that part of the issue is the way that we divide the world by disciplines.
[00:36:20] Speaker C: Yes, indeed.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: Because, I mean, systems thinking has been around. The idea of systems thinking has been around for a long time, but it's always approached from particular directions.
[00:36:34] Speaker C: And the hardest part, my old mentor Edward Land, the founder of Polaroid, used to say is the people who seem to have had a new idea have often just stopped having an old idea.
So the first thing you have to do to be good at integrative design is what the asian cultures call beginner's mind, child mind, original mind, where you let go of all your assumptions and preconceptions and therefore are able to have new ideas.
[00:37:01] Speaker B: Losing that sort of technological fix commitment, I think, is pretty difficult.
So let me ask you about this with respect to electric cars. All right, I see the logic or the argument for electric cars. But on the other hand, if our transportation system has deep flaws, electric cars are simply a technological solution to the energy problem and not the congestion and mobility.
[00:37:31] Speaker C: That's right. They still take up space, they still use materials and so on. And yeah, we got a couple of electric cars. We don't drive them much. We just live out in the countryside where the distances are too great to get around otherwise. But if you're in a more urban setting, of course it should be designed so you're already where you want to be, so you don't need to go somewhere else.
I lived for ten years in London, and within five minutes walk in each of four directions was a little sort of village where I could get almost anything I wanted. And on the rare occasion when I couldn't, I would jump on the underground and in a few minutes I'd be at a bigger area where I could get that.
If we let all ways to get around or not need to compete fairly, and we didn't enforce sprawl by subsidies and zoning, I think have much better lives and have to move around less.
[00:38:36] Speaker B: Well, I mean, London, so to speak, was designed for a thousand years. You look at a place like Los Angeles, right? And it's not designed for walking and infrastructure like freeways. I won't say they're destiny, but they're there for the long haul.
[00:38:54] Speaker C: Well, but we used to have very good trolleys and so on.
You could go from Boston to St. Louis on the interurbans, early 20th century, faster than you could go now in a car. But those were bought up and shut down to promote, it turns out, buses tire company that wanted to sell bus tires.
It never occurred to most of the car promoters that they could actually socialize most of the costs of driving and just keep the profits.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: Do we think about using highways as right of ways for rail systems?
Again, it's this question of if you want to actually transform in the United States, transform this car oriented society with all of its built infrastructure. How do you think about that?
[00:39:53] Speaker C: Well, it'll be hard, it'll be slow, but certainly not subsidizing. Driving is a good start. So the drivers, as a canadian colleague said, will get what they pay for and pay for what they get.
[00:40:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:11] Speaker C: And I think the politics may be ripe for that, because at least a third of Americans now are too old, young, poor, or infirm to drive.
And once they realize that they're subsidizing car drivers, they may team up with antitax conservatives and do something really interesting.
[00:40:34] Speaker B: Okay, we can hope you're right.
[00:40:36] Speaker C: And also, by the way, there are some interesting technologies. Like, there's one called Cybertran. That is an ultralight rail that you can build right over the median of an existing road. It just stands up on little pillars, and it's very small and light, but it's many times cheaper than conventional light rail.
Like eight times in some cases.
[00:41:03] Speaker B: Yeah. We have an longtime advocate of things like that here. The question that I posed, I think, to him was, what happens if one of the vehicles breaks down? You have a single line, and everything else stops on the line.
[00:41:22] Speaker C: Well, you would almost certainly have multiple motors. So I'm not sure what breakdown means. If you have proper redundancy electricity, you get it onto the nearest siding.
[00:41:35] Speaker B: So it's a design again.
[00:41:37] Speaker C: Yeah, it's an engineering issue. I think it's a manageable one. Having to wrap yourself in two or three tons of steel to go anywhere makes no sense at all. Actually, I said we drive our electric cars rarely. Part of the reason for that is that my commute to work is 10 meters across the jungle. Yeah, maybe I should install vines and swing to work.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: Well, that would certainly be ecologically more efficient, I suppose. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz. You're listening to sustainability. Now, my guest today is Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute. Longtime energy futurist, Amory. In our last ten minutes or so, maybe you can tell us about your philosophy of applied hope.
[00:42:21] Speaker C: Oh, well, I tell you a little story. The pioneer Bill McClarney was one day stirring a vat of algae in his lab in Costa Rica, and this brassy north american lady strode in and said, what are you doing stirring this green goo and what really matters in the world? Love.
He thought about that a while.
He said, well, there's theoretical love, and then there's applied love. Kept on stirring. So I'm one of the many people who stir and drive in a spirit call applied hope, which is not some abstract long term goal. It is not mere glandular optimism. It's taking actions, making choices every hour, every day, that create a world worth being hopeful about. The best way to do that is tangible, scalable change in the right direction. Francis Moore Lepe said, hope is a stance, not an assessment. Important not to confuse the two, but I want to be clear that I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Those are, as Dave Brower said, two different sides of the same simplistic surrender to fatalism, where you treat the future as fate, not choice, and don't take responsibility for creating the world you want. But it's a very good way to live. And it really follows. Advice from welsh development economist named Raymond James, who said, to be truly radical is to make hope possible, not despair. Convincing. Sometimes I gave a talk at a college and a number of people pop up in the question period to recite all the suffering in the universe, all the things that are going wrong, and say, how dare you propose solutions? Isn't resistance futile? Best way I found to deal with that is to say, yeah, I can see how you would feel that way. Tell me, does it make you more effective? I had a young lady in a class a while back who was so down about all the problems in the world, she couldn't imagine bringing a child into the world. And she'd lost all hope. And we talked about it, and it quickly became obvious to both of us that she hadn't lost hope at all. She knew exactly where she'd left it.
[00:45:00] Speaker B: Somewhere. As I was trolling through various materials, I came upon this story about parachuting cats.
[00:45:07] Speaker C: Oh, yes.
[00:45:08] Speaker B: And I wonder if you could, as.
[00:45:11] Speaker C: An idea, let me tell you a little story.
[00:45:13] Speaker B: True apply to hope. Yeah. Why don't you tell us in our last few minutes, tell us about that one.
[00:45:19] Speaker C: Well, in Borneo in the 1950s, a lot of the Diac people had malaria, and the World Health Organization had a solution. They would spray DDT all over. So they did that. Mosquitoes died, malaria declined. So far, so good. But there were side effects, like the roofs of the houses started to fall down on people's heads because the DDT had also killed tiny little parasitic wasps that had formerly controlled the thatch eating caterpillars, which then bunched up the thatching and the roofs fell down. So the colonial government gave people sheet metal roofs, and then they were driven nuts by the lack of sleep because of the noise of the tropical rain on the tin roofs at night. Meanwhile, the DDT poisoned bugs were getting eaten by little lizardy things called geckos. And the geckos were eaten by cats, and the DDT built up in the food chain and killed the cats. Or maybe the cats licked the DDT off their fur. But anyway, the cats died. And without the cats, the rats flourished and multiplied. And soon the World Health Organization was threatened with potential outbreaks of typhus and sylvatic plague, which it would itself have created. And they had to call in the Royal Air Force from Singapore to round up lots of stray cats in Kuala Lumpur and parish a very large number of live cats into Borneo. Operation Cat drop. We don't know exactly how they did it. We're trying to trace it through the archives. But what this story tells you is that if you don't understand how things are connected, quite often the cause of problems is solutions. Most of our problems are of that kind. We cause them by trying to do just one thing. But if we can understand and harness hidden connections, then we can often solve, or better still, avoid a problem in a way that solves or avoids a lot of other problems at the same time without making new ones before somebody has to go parachuting more cats. And I think that's a very good reason to be hopeful about where applied hope can take us. Because the things we need to do for justice, prosperity, climate, health, all the things we want, including security and peace, to spend very much on sensible things like using energy and resources in a way that saves money. There's no downside. There's a lot of work to do. We need to get on with it.
[00:47:55] Speaker B: Okay, well, that seems like a good place to end our conversation. I want to thank you so much for being my guest on sustainability. Now, a lot of interesting and stimulating points, and I'll encourage our listeners to go off in search of your publications and videos and podcasts. So once again, thank you very much for being my guest.
[00:48:21] Speaker C: My pleasure. Thank you.
[00:48:23] Speaker B: You've been listening to an interview with Amory Lovins, energy guru and co founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, right here on Sustainability. Now, if you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] slash SustainabilityNow as well as Spotify, Google podcasts, and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. Thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make k squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next, every other Sunday. Sustainability now.
[00:49:04] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out. Temperate zones and tropical climbs and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees strong goes on and save sunshine good planets are hard to find. Yeah, good.
