No matter how cynical I become, it's never enough to keep up.

[GliderGuider]

I just found out that Amory B. Lovins, the (very) famous environmental writer and founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute is in the writers' stable of...

- The Council on Foreign Relations

"The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), founded in 1921, is a United States nonprofit, 4900 member organization, publisher, and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs, headquartered in New York City, with an additional office in Washington, D.C.. Its membership has included senior politicians, more than a dozen secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, lawyers, professors, and senior media figures. The CFR promotes globalization, free trade, reducing financial regulations on transnational corporations, and economic consolidation into regional blocs such as NAFTA or the European Union, and develops policy recommendations that reflect these goals."

He has had five articles published (and presumably paid for) by them: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/amory-b-lovins
I shit thee not.
No wonder I always thought Lovins was a clueless git. Now I know who git him his clues.

[Binkie The Clown]

1. I guess it's small consolation that

these clueless morons will fry right along with the rest of us as the planet becomes uninhabitable.

[hatrack]

3. No, actually slightly later, in potentially more comfortable surroundings

Otherwise, no substantive difference in outcomes.

[Binkie The Clown]

4. I'm not sure I agree.

When the economy collapses their "money" won't mean a thing. It will be digital bits on computer drives that nobody can read. And since a lot of them don't really know how to take care of themselves, when their servants and helpers and assistants turn their backs on them, they will be the first to go extinct. How will they eat when their favorite restaurant is no longer taking reservations, or when their cook has left to take care of her own family? They will be helpless infants in a world where none of their "skills" are relevant any more.

[hatrack]

5. That's when things become Praetorian very quickly

Once the muscle realizes that it knows the access codes, and knows how to run the computers, and knows where the fuel and food are stashed, who needs T. Johnston, J. Wentworth and F. Billington IV?

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. Unless of course, they invest it wisely

Let’s say, for example, the rich build huge greenhouses…

[daleanime]

2. ........

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. No attribution to Lily Tomlin!? (No text here.)

[GliderGuider]

8. No, should there have been?

What difference would such pedantic punctiliousness have made to the tone and substance of the post?

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. I, like Lily Tomlin, was trying to be funny… (no text here either…)

[GliderGuider]

10. Oops! I, like George Bush, was being slow on the uptake.

[kristopher]

11. Wow, you must be right; the John Birch Society agrees with you!

CFR Pushes End to Sovereignty at UN's Doha Climate Summit
By: William F. Jasper 12/05/2012 Print E-mail

The Council on Foreign Relations, which has been in the forefront of global warming alarmists for over two decades, continues to push world government as the "solution" at the UN's Doha Climate Summit.

The UN Climate Summit in Doha, Qatar, (see here and here) is in its second week, headed for completion on Friday, December 7. Most analysts and observers expect little in the way of major developments or breakthrough agreements to come out of it. With the world economy in shambles, and nearly all national governments awash in debt, there is diminishing incentive for politicians to spend scarce public funds on the much-hyped hypothetical future “threats” posed by global warming — especially when there are very real, tangible issues demanding immediate attention and funding.

However, the climate change lobby is not rolling over and calling it quits; they have too much invested to back away now. A tabulation of funding in 2007 by Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, found that the climate alarmists had received over $50 billion since 1990. That was five years ago; naturally, the price tag has gone up considerably since then.

Most of this enormous funding avalanche came from governments, with the biggest chunk coming from the U.S. federal government. State governments have also been big funders, along with foreign national governments, the European Union, United Nations agencies, the World Bank, the big tax-exempt foundations, and major Wall Street banks and corporations. This money infusion has launched a huge climate industry, with universities, institutions, think tanks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), professors, scientists, researchers, and activists all dependent on maintaining the flow of funds. The major banks and investors that have jumped on board the climate change wagon see a great deal of green to be made from the global sale of carbon credits. Trillions of dollars could change hands, but only if a carbon trading regime is forced on consumers by governments.

Foremost among the groups that have been driving the global warming alarm bandwagon is the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). There are many think tanks affecting national policies, but the CFR, long ranked as the premier brain trust, is still the most influential...

http://www.jbs.org/issues-pages/cfr-pushes-end-to-sovereignty-at-uns-doha-climate-summit

They say 2 decades, so I imagine they missed Lovins' work in the mid 70s (4 decades ago). Since you align your (secret nuclear loving*) self with the John Birch Society as a means of attacking Amory Lovins, here is a snip from a recent work by a (real) scholar that discusses his contribution of that time.

...Since at least the time of the controversy surrounding the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) in the early 1960s, environmentalism had been developing as a coherent and significant perspective in public affairs. This development continued during the late 1960s as environmental activism not only took its place among other forms of social activism that were arising in the period, but also gained dramatic recognition in 1970 with the enactment of NEPA and with the first Earth Day in the spring of that year. Central to environmentalism was a concern to somehow limit and redirect the project of industrialism, and this concern manifested itself in the case of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline controversy by environmentalist calls for another approach to energy policy, one that would place substantially greater reliance upon conservation and the development of alternative sources of energy (Manning, 1974). The Interior Department’s refusal to hold a public discussion of its final environmental impact statement combined with the congressional exemption of the pipeline from further court action to rule out serious consideration of the environmentalist approach. Nonetheless, a general reorientation of energy strategy had been the central focus of work undertaken by physicist Amory B. Lovins since 1971 in his capacity as the British representative of the Friends of the Earth. His various early publications on developing an environmentalist energy strategy were issued in 1975 in the form of the book World Energy Strategies, followed the next year by his influential Foreign Affairs article, ‘Energy strategy: the road not taken’ (1976), which summarized his position by introducing the contrast between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ energy paths. The hard path was the conventional approach to energy strategy, which focused on expanding sources of supply, principally through hydrocarbon and nuclear megaprojects. The Trans- Alaska Pipeline was a particular megaproject that manifested the direction of the hard path. The soft path, by contrast, included new sources of energy, principally renewable forms, but the key to the strategy involved a reversal from a focus on increasing supply to what Lovins called – in a departure from the connotations of the term ‘conservation’ – increasing the ‘efficiency’ of energy use: when you have a barrel that is leaking oil, you can either try to keep up with the rate of loss by pouring more oil into the barrel or you can fix the hole. Lovins recommended fixing what he deemed an extremely large hole, and proceeded to offer detailed proposals about how to manage energy demand (e.g. 1977).

In the course of his work, Lovins repeatedly voiced concern about the prospect of climate change if the hard path were maintained, citing among other sources the major 1971 study Inadvertent Climate Modification (Wilson et al., 1971), which involved an international research team more than forty strong under the auspices of MIT and the Swedish science and engineering academies. Although stressing uncertainties, this study already spoke in terms – quite familiar today – of the ‘growing urgency of taking action before some devastating forces are set in motion’ in an irreversible manner. This danger included the ‘real possibility of a global temperature increase’ some four decades hence because of rising levels of humanly produced carbon dioxide and heat – with the consequence of ‘a dramatic reduction or even elimination of arctic sea ice’ that would initiate a positive feedback mechanism tending to increase the temperature further because of diminished ‘global albedo’, or reflective capacity (Wilson et al., 1971, pp. 27, 17, 78; cf. Lovins, 1975, p. 112 n. 19). Lovins went on to speak explicitly in his Foreign Affairs article of ‘virtually unavoidable’ atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide ‘early’ in the twenty-first century that would give rise ‘then or soon thereafter’ to ‘substantial and perhaps irreversible changes in global climate’ (1976, p. 67). Despite their claims to rationality and expertise, pipeline proponents in industry and government gave no attention to this possibility and certainly did not take it into account in the promotion or design of the pipeline. If federal government moves in 1972 and 1973 had not eliminated opportunities for democratic politics in the form of either public hearings or court action, there would then have been a prospect for the issue of climate change to have become a matter of public deliberation.

In retrospect, we can see that the construction of the pipeline in Alaska was part of a larger pattern of energy development and that an alternative orientation was emerging at the time, informed by a significant insight into the energy problem. That insight, central to Lovins’s soft path, involved a reversal in the way the energy problem was defined. To be pursued seriously – and thereby tested – the soft path would have required both potent political commitment and significant financial investment, sustained over a substantial period. As it happened, Lovins became quite influential after the publication of his Foreign Affairs article in 1976, and some initiatives were begun on elements of his soft path strategy, with President Jimmy Carter going so far as to install solar collectors on the White House. When Ronald Reagan later entered the White House, however, the elements of the hard path were emphatically reaffirmed, and the solar collectors were removed, eventually to become what Carter had feared – a museum piece (Green, 2009).

As Lovins in the 1970s had framed the prospect of climate change, the hard path was a key part of the problem, and the soft path was key to the solution. During the decades since then, the prospect of climate change has increasingly come to be perceived not as a speculative possibility, but as an immediate crisis. In regard to Alaska and other northern regions, indeed, the concern has arisen that dramatically increasing temperatures have begun to melt permafrost to such an extent that the melting could release greenhouse gases – particularly methane – in quantities sufficient to substantially exacerbate the problem of global climate change.

- Douglas Torgerson; Policy Problems and Democratic Politics: instrumental rationality reconsidered;
Social Science and Policy Challenges: Democracy, Values and Capacities;
edited by G. Papanagnou; UNESCO Publishing; 2011; 79-82

What were you doing about climate change in 1976?

*In spite of your attempts to disavow your "previous" love affair with nuclear, your inability to resist attacking Lovins (the nuclear industry's favorite villain) seems to show you're still engaging in your own special brand of clumsy participation in their cause.

[GliderGuider]

12. That's certainly a novel defense.

Your smears get more desperate all the time.

Lovins sold out to the MIC for a fistful of dollars. Accept it, and move on. You may still be able to do something positive with your life.

[kristopher]

13. There is no smear involved - just stating the facts.

You pick up on right wing conspiracy theories and try to discredit Lovins via his participation in the existing system of governance, economics, and policy. But I guess since his motives, his work and his objectives are 100% consistent with addressing climate change, you really have no choice but to pull ham-handed shenanigans like this thread.
I mean, think about how pathetic an impression it makes when the best you can muster is to breathlessly and repeatedly proclaim "we're doomed because no one will do anything about climate change". Then, in the next gasp of air, you align yourself with climate deniers to attack someone with a 40 year history of working in single-minded fashion on dealing with the problem because - and this is the real hoot - HE DEALS WITH THE PRINCIPLES WHO ARE ABLE TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM.
Yep, that is his sin - he has worked unwaveringly for almost half a century actually doing the work of addressing climate change at its source.

Now, not to go off on too far of a tangent, but, speaking of you being a doomist, how is that "peak oil is going to cause civilization to collapse in 2012 and kill us all unless we move to nuclear" thing working out for you?

[Nihil]

14. "discredit Lovins via his participation in the existing system of governance, economics and policy"

Just like BP then. And Exxon. And Halliburton. And ...

They have had lovely greenwashing PR projects that worked a treat with
"the existing system of governance, economics and policy".

It made a nice profit for them too.

Just coincidence of course. Handy side-effect of "dealing with the principAls
who are able to address the problem" BUT WHO DON'T.

Nobody is 100% good or 100% bad. Lovins has undeniably done many
good things.

He's also been used by "the existing system, etc." as a valuable asset
in the greenwashed facade that is desperately maintaining Business As Usual
(and successfully too, throughout Lovins' entire "40 year history&quot .

You are happy to poke fun at failed/delayed "Peak Oil in 2010" prophecies.

Others are happy to poke fun at failed/delayed "Hydrogen cars in 2000" prophecies.

Don't be surprised that when grubby little inconveniencies of the real world
appear relating to your chosen saint, people will be happy to poke fun at
Lovins two-faced career.

[kristopher]

16. Poor little nuclear Nihil... What were you doing about AGW in 1976?

Lovins' efforts at energy efficiency have resulted in more reductions in carbon emissions that any of his critics will ever achieve.

His only "fault" is that in his proven true analysis of what needs to change to address climate change he correctly linked nuclear with coal. The desire of nuclear loving (2 faced) frauds to destroy anyone that obstructs their agenda knows no bounds.

[Nihil]

23. I love it when you show that you are out of factual responses ...

... and have to resort to proven lies in order to reply at all ...

There is no justifiable defence of your saint.

QED.

[kristopher]

24. I like the way you try to twist my position by using "saint"

My defense of Lovins is, as it was with Jacobson before him, not motivated by any sense of adulation. I do indeed respect both of them, but that falls far short of your implication.

My defense is grounded in nothing more than a sense of deep outrage at the Rovian style tactics of personal destruction that you and other nuclear acolytes routinely employ to attack critics of nuclear power. Seriously, you can't compete in the arena of ideas and legitimate debate so you try to cheat by hurting people.

So it isn't complicated and my response is entirely appropriate; no one likes mean, dishonest people

[GliderGuider]

27. "no one likes mean, dishonest people"

My irony meter just exploded. Thanks for the laffs, old boy.

[GliderGuider]

15. I share a belief that is common on the left wing

That belief is that the tip of the economic and political power pyramid is where many of the most egregious problems of society originate and are implemented. Groups like the CFR and Bilderberg are visible representatives of the highest levels of that power structure - the same one the Koch brothers belong to. Their members are the ones who pull the strings, who compose the tunes that the rest of us must dance to in order to earn the money to buy our daily bread. That's not some left-wing conspiracy theory, it's a statement of fact that I'm sure all the members of those organizations not only agree with, but are proud of - though they would probably phrase it differently.

People who work directly for any power structure can't do so in isolation from its core values. My working assumption, like many of my left-wing brethren, is that if one lies down with dogs, one gets up with fleas. The closer one lies to them, the more likely the infestation.

I understand the urge to work from the inside, especially when the rewards are so lucrative. Stewart Brand and Mark Lynas have also fallen under that spell. Now I find out that Lovins was a charter member of that club. A certain degree of disappointment is inevitable.

[kristopher]

18. What a crock

Last edited Thu Oct 15, 2015, 02:53 PM - Edit history (2)

The Council on Foreign Relations has about 5000 members representing a wide range of points of view.

You are the one here in bed with the likes of the John Birch Society.

ETA: I love it - you align yourself with the JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY and then try to redirect attention with any lame thought that crosses you mind.

I would say it is obvious you've never read Foreign Affairs, but I know you write this only to try and malign Lovins because he so effectively opposes nuclear power.

The truth of what or who publishes Foreign Affairs or what the content of the journal actually consists of means nothing to you at all. You thought you'd found a conspiracy field well plowed by the likes of the John Birch Society and you decided it was a great place to hoe a couple of rows yourself.

The JBS:

CFR Pushes End to Sovereignty at UN's Doha Climate Summit
By: William F. Jasper 12/05/2012 Print E-mail

The Council on Foreign Relations, which has been in the forefront of global warming alarmists for over two decades, continues to push world government as the "solution" at the UN's Doha Climate Summit.

The UN Climate Summit in Doha, Qatar, (see here and here) is in its second week, headed for completion on Friday, December 7. Most analysts and observers expect little in the way of major developments or breakthrough agreements to come out of it. With the world economy in shambles, and nearly all national governments awash in debt, there is diminishing incentive for politicians to spend scarce public funds on the much-hyped hypothetical future “threats” posed by global warming — especially when there are very real, tangible issues demanding immediate attention and funding.

However, the climate change lobby is not rolling over and calling it quits; they have too much invested to back away now. A tabulation of funding in 2007 by Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, found that the climate alarmists had received over $50 billion since 1990. That was five years ago; naturally, the price tag has gone up considerably since then.

Most of this enormous funding avalanche came from governments, with the biggest chunk coming from the U.S. federal government. State governments have also been big funders, along with foreign national governments, the European Union, United Nations agencies, the World Bank, the big tax-exempt foundations, and major Wall Street banks and corporations. This money infusion has launched a huge climate industry, with universities, institutions, think tanks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), professors, scientists, researchers, and activists all dependent on maintaining the flow of funds. The major banks and investors that have jumped on board the climate change wagon see a great deal of green to be made from the global sale of carbon credits. Trillions of dollars could change hands, but only if a carbon trading regime is forced on consumers by governments.

Foremost among the groups that have been driving the global warming alarm bandwagon is the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). There are many think tanks affecting national policies, but the CFR, long ranked as the premier brain trust, is still the most influential...

http://www.jbs.org/issues-pages/cfr-pushes-end-to-sovereignty-at-uns-doha-climate-summit

- Douglas Torgerson; Policy Problems and Democratic Politics: instrumental rationality reconsidered;
Social Science and Policy Challenges: Democracy, Values and Capacities;
edited by G. Papanagnou; UNESCO Publishing; 2011; 79-82

...The Interior Department’s refusal to hold a public discussion of its final environmental impact statement combined with the congressional exemption of the pipeline from further court action to rule out serious consideration of the environmentalist approach. Nonetheless, a general reorientation of energy strategy had been the central focus of work undertaken by physicist Amory B. Lovins since 1971 in his capacity as the British representative of the Friends of the Earth. His various early publications on developing an environmentalist energy strategy were issued in 1975 in the form of the book World Energy Strategies, followed the next year by his influential Foreign Affairs article, ‘Energy strategy: the road not taken’ (1976), which summarized his position by introducing the contrast between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ energy paths. The hard path was the conventional approach to energy strategy, which focused on expanding sources of supply, principally through hydrocarbon and nuclear megaprojects. The Trans- Alaska Pipeline was a particular megaproject that manifested the direction of the hard path. The soft path, by contrast, included new sources of energy, principally renewable forms, but the key to the strategy involved a reversal from a focus on increasing supply to what Lovins called – in a departure from the connotations of the term ‘conservation’ – increasing the ‘efficiency’ of energy use: when you have a barrel that is leaking oil, you can either try to keep up with the rate of loss by pouring more oil into the barrel or you can fix the hole. Lovins recommended fixing what he deemed an extremely large hole, and proceeded to offer detailed proposals about how to manage energy demand (e.g. 1977).

In the course of his work, Lovins repeatedly voiced concern about the prospect of climate change if the hard path were maintained, citing among other sources the major 1971 study Inadvertent Climate Modification (Wilson et al., 1971), which involved an international research team more than forty strong under the auspices of MIT and the Swedish science and engineering academies. Although stressing uncertainties, this study already spoke in terms – quite familiar today – of the ‘growing urgency of taking action before some devastating forces are set in motion’ in an irreversible manner. This danger included the ‘real possibility of a global temperature increase’ some four decades hence because of rising levels of humanly produced carbon dioxide and heat – with the consequence of ‘a dramatic reduction or even elimination of arctic sea ice’ that would initiate a positive feedback mechanism tending to increase the temperature further because of diminished ‘global albedo’, or reflective capacity (Wilson et al., 1971, pp. 27, 17, 78; cf. Lovins, 1975, p. 112 n. 19). Lovins went on to speak explicitly in his Foreign Affairs article of ‘virtually unavoidable’ atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide ‘early’ in the twenty-first century that would give rise ‘then or soon thereafter’ to ‘substantial and perhaps irreversible changes in global climate’ (1976, p. 67). Despite their claims to rationality and expertise, pipeline proponents in industry and government gave no attention to this possibility and certainly did not take it into account in the promotion or design of the pipeline. If federal government moves in 1972 and 1973 had not eliminated opportunities for democratic politics in the form of either public hearings or court action, there would then have been a prospect for the issue of climate change to have become a matter of public deliberation.

In retrospect, we can see that the construction of the pipeline in Alaska was part of a larger pattern of energy development and that an alternative orientation was emerging at the time, informed by a significant insight into the energy problem. That insight, central to Lovins’s soft path, involved a reversal in the way the energy problem was defined. To be pursued seriously – and thereby tested – the soft path would have required both potent political commitment and significant financial investment, sustained over a substantial period. As it happened, Lovins became quite influential after the publication of his Foreign Affairs article in 1976, and some initiatives were begun on elements of his soft path strategy, with President Jimmy Carter going so far as to install solar collectors on the White House. When Ronald Reagan later entered the White House, however, the elements of the hard path were emphatically reaffirmed, and the solar collectors were removed, eventually to become what Carter had feared – a museum piece (Green, 2009).

As Lovins in the 1970s had framed the prospect of climate change, the hard path was a key part of the problem, and the soft path was key to the solution. During the decades since then, the prospect of climate change has increasingly come to be perceived not as a speculative possibility, but as an immediate crisis. In regard to Alaska and other northern regions, indeed, the concern has arisen that dramatically increasing temperatures have begun to melt permafrost to such an extent that the melting could release greenhouse gases – particularly methane – in quantities sufficient to substantially exacerbate the problem of global climate change.

What were you doing about climate change in 1976, GG?

[GliderGuider]

21. They represent the 1% of the 1%

Nice to know where your sympathies lie.

[cprise]

26. JBS are teabaggers. Everyone knows they hate Reagan/Bush Republicans

...which is a good description of CFR.

[GliderGuider]

17. "Since you align your (secret nuclear loving*) self with the John Birch Society"

Please explain how the above is not a smear. I'm all ears.

[kristopher]

19. You are just replaying their paranoid message without attribution.

[GliderGuider]

20. As I expected.

Bupkis.

You know what they say about paranoids - It takes one to suspect one...

[FBaggins]

22. "His motives, his work and his objectives are 100% consistent with addressing climate change" ?

100%? Really?

His shilling for the coal industry (preferring coal to both nuclear and gas) would put a dent in that score for most rational observers.

[cprise]

25. This is major fail for RMI and his own legacy.

He's not helping anyone by aligning with freemarket policies.