Selection 15

More Profit with Less Carbon

Amory B. Lovins

Lovins discusses his ideas that he has been talking about for the past thirty years about how if done right climate protection can reduce costs in big businesses. Many companies have reduced their green house gases by moving to more energy efficient factories and they have seen a rise in quality, reliability, and profit.

Lovins believes that everyone should be using energy efficient techniques but that people have confused energy efficiency with discomfort or privation. He also believes that energy users do not recognize how much they can benefit because it requires a lot of people to make small differences to see a large change. Along with his idea that we can create abundance of energy by good designs he also believes that we should switch to fuels that emit less carbon. Lovins believes that we can save the most energy by rethinking how we can get more work out of the energy that is delivered to businesses and consumers.

Efficient technology has been getting less expensive over time. Lovins discusses how people usually don't use efficient technology when the cost of putting in the new materials is more than the savings over time of using them. He then goes onto discuss his house in Colorado that is super efficient at storing heat, an experiment in smart design with a house in California that keeps cool without air conditioning, and a carpet factory in Shanghai that reduced its cost just by widening and straightening their heat circulating pipes. What he was demonstrating is that efficient technology is available and all we need to do is use it along with applying smart designs to save money and our environment.

Lovins then goes on to talk about the efficiency of vehicles. Cars lose a lot of the energy they use as noise, heat, and friction which makes them very in-efficient. He then states that if you reduce the weight of a vehicle then the energy that goes into driving it will increase. He also said that cars don't have to be heavy to be safe. However the oil saved in designing new cars would not be very effective because there would still be older model vehicles on the road. Lovins thinks we should try to reduce our consumption of oil and maybe eventually replace it with a lower carbon natural gas. If we were to become independent of oil then we would immediately see the many benefits.

Renewable energy such as wind and solar is the way of the future and has been rising in use. If both efficiency and renewable energy continue to grow faster than the economy, then carbon emissions will fall and global warming will slow. People are beginning to favor choices that generate wealth and protect the environment and this needs to continue into the future.