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Lovins-style conservation only stretches out the profitability of the fossil fuel industry for a longer period of time. What Lovins promotes is actually beneficial to the fossil fuel industry.
For example, if you want to reduce the amount of coal that is used in power plants, you can't do it by conservation, you have to do it by explicitly limiting the use of coal in power plants. If we shut down coal power plants conservation will follow by necessity. "Conserving" electricity without shutting down coal power plants simply allows for the continued growth of electricity demand elsewhere in the economy.
I think one of the greater crisis this nation is about to face is natural gas shortages, and that these shortages will have a greater impact upon our daily lives than high gasoline prices. By his promotion of natural gas as a clean and efficient "soft energy" fuel, and his support for various cogeneration schemes which can be at best short term mitigation for an indefinitely long term problem, Amory Lovins will bear some of the responsibility for this crisis. If we embark upon a large scale synthetic fuel from coal program then I'll lay part of the blame for that on his doorstep too.
Left wing political environmentalists despise the "technological fix" while promoting "soft energy" and "appropriate technology." They use these nebulous phrases as arguments against nuclear power, industrial agriculture, and many other very large scale technologies, some of which might potentially save our collective asses from the fire. At the same time they fail to recognize Mr. Lovins as a master of the stealth technological fix, and an enabler of existing industries. Lovins makes a very good living selling corporate greenwash because he is not a threat to the existing political structure.
Mr. Lovins is trained as a physicist and I've not seen evidence he's a student of the very complex and interconnected systems of the natural sciences, especially population biology. Most of the wreckage wrought by humans is the result of our raw numbers, and every little technological tweak that has allowed us to "conserve" resources has only served to increase our numbers and the overall damage we do to the earth's environment. Lovins consistently trips over Jevon's Paradox.
My own formal training is in environmental biology, and I am especially interested in evolutionary biology. I tend to be a rather hard core environmentalist, and I am pessimistic that the human race can maintain it's current population, much less a resource intensive and affluent "first world" lifestyle for any substantial populations.
Our current world economy is founded upon our extraction of petroleum. As was inevitable the extraction of petroleum has peaked and reserves of the least expensive sorts of petroleum, the reserves that powered the great economic expansions of the 20th century, are very rapidly declining.
Human society is in a bad situation. Amory Lovins is part of the establishment that is hindering us from moving forward to an economy that is truly sustainable. Conservation and efficiency is a false hope that distracts us from the work of building social and economic structures that are truly sustainable.
Personally I think the solutions to our problems will arise within our pursuit of Social Justice, Human Rights, and Education. When we recognize the harm an economy based on non-renewable resources inflicts upon our fellow human beings -- especially those living in extreme poverty in the shadows of our extraction industries, those suffering the results of environmental destruction, and those suffering war -- only then will we be able to devise long term solutions to our problems.
Overall I've decided I might pay a little more attention to Amory Lovins if he tore down his Rocky Mountain Institute and restored the land underneath it to its natural state, and then moved his entire operation to some run-down urban area where he might witness daily the challenges ordinary people face as the true costs of fossil fuels begin to eat into their economic well being. Unfortunately RMI would no longer be an attractive side trip on the way to the ski slopes and hiking trails.
For now Lovins is just another airport commuter with an expense account. There are thousands of technical people who do what he does as part of their ordinary jobs who are not selling themselves as social visionaries. The usefulness of Amory Lovins to large corporations and government agencies is the name brand he has established for himself. If an executive or bureaucrat needs to look like they actually care about the environment for commercial or political reasons, they can simply hire Amory Lovins. Maybe they will reduce their energy costs, and reduce their environmental impact, but that's not the point. The point is to look like they care.
In a truly sustainable society many of the institutions that hire Amory Lovins, such as Wal-Mart or our Department of Defense, simply wouldn't exist as they do now. For example you can tweak the energy efficiency of our current military and save a little oil and natural gas, but that's not a sustainable solution. If we simply eliminated 95% of our military, and switched what was left to sustainable energy and resource inputs, that would be an actual long term solution. This is not the sort of problem that can be solved by technical fixes such as cogeneration at existing military installations, instead it requires basic changes to the political structure of the United States which is a territory Amory Lovins will not venture into. His "win-win" means more of the same old economics and politics, which means more cruel labor for most of the people living on this earth.
It would be nice if we could have our cake and eat it too, but those are not the rules of life on earth. We are not the first living creature to experience a rapid population expansion. But unless we discover how to make faster-than-light interstellar space ships for the cost of a wheelbarrow, very soon now the human population will reach its limit, and probably its peak. If we can hold some sort of civilization together while this unsustainable economy collapses, perhaps the downslope will be shallow enough for most people to live full and rewarding lives. Otherwise it's nature's business as usual, a world where there are fewer opportunities to live and more ways to die.
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