Paul Hawken Amory Lovins L Hunter Lovins Popular Books

Paul Hawken Amory Lovins L Hunter Lovins Biography & Facts

Amory Bloch Lovins (born November 13, 1947) is an American writer, physicist, and former chairman/chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute. He has written on energy policy and related areas for four decades, and served on the US National Petroleum Council, an oil industry lobbying group, from 2011 to 2018. Lovins has promoted energy efficiency, the use of renewable energy sources, and the generation of energy at or near the site where the energy is actually used. Lovins has also advocated a "negawatt revolution" arguing that utility customers don't want kilowatt-hours of electricity; they want energy services. In the 1990s, his work with Rocky Mountain Institute included the design of an ultra-efficient automobile, the Hypercar. He has provided expert testimony and published 31 books, including Reinventing Fire, Winning the Oil Endgame, Small is Profitable, Brittle Power, and Natural Capitalism. Early life and education Lovins was born in Washington, DC. His father, Gerald H. Lovins worked as an engineer and his mother, Miriam Lovins, worked as a social services administrator. Lovins is the brother of Julie Beth Lovins, a computational linguist who wrote the first stemming algorithm for word matching. In 1964, Lovins entered Harvard College as a National Merit Scholar. After two years there, he transferred to Oxford. In 1969, he became a junior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford, as a result of which he had a temporary Oxford master of arts status. He left without a degree in 1971, because the university would not allow him to pursue a doctorate in energy. Lovins moved to London to pursue his energy work, and returned to the United States in 1981. He settled in western Colorado in 1982. Lovins' four grandparents emigrated to the United States from small villages lying between Kyiv and Odesa in Ukraine in the early 20th century. Most of his remaining family are believed to have been killed by German Nazis in the 1941 Tarashcha massacre. Work Friends of the Earth Each summer from 1965 to 1981, Lovins guided mountaineering trips and photographed the White Mountains of New Hampshire, contributing photographs to At Home in the Wild: New England's White Mountains. In 1971, he wrote about Wales' endangered Snowdonia National Park in the book, Eryri, the Mountains of Longing, commissioned by David Brower, president of Friends of the Earth. Lovins spent about a decade as British representative for Friends of the Earth. During the early 1970s, Lovins became interested in resource policy, especially energy policy. The 1973 energy crisis helped create an audience for his writing and an essay originally penned as a U.N. paper grew into his first book concerned with energy, World Energy Strategies (1973). His next book was Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy (1975), co-authored with John H. Price. Rocky Mountain Institute By 1978, Lovins had published six books and consulted widely. In 1982, he and his wife, Hunter Lovins founded Rocky Mountain Institute, based in Snowmass, Colorado. Together with a group of colleagues, the Lovinses fostered efficient resource use and sustainable development. Lovins clients have included many Fortune 500 companies, real-estate developers, and utilities. Public-sector clients have included the OECD, UN, Resources for the Future, many national governments, and 13 US states. Lovins served in 1980 and 1981 on the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Research Advisory Board, and from 1999 to 2001 and 2006 to 2008 on Defense Science Board task forces on military energy efficiency and strategy. His visiting academic chairs most recently included a visiting professorship in Stanford University's school of engineering. Since 1982, RMI has grown into a broad-based "think-and-do tank" with more than 600 staff and an annual budget over $120 million. RMI has spun off five for-profit companies. Ideas Soft energy paths Amory Lovins published an article in Foreign Affairs called "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" in 1976. Lovins argued that the United States had arrived at an important crossroads and could take one of two paths. The first, supported by U.S. policy, promised a future of steadily increasing reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear fission, and had serious environmental risks. The alternative, which Lovins called "the soft path", favored "benign" sources of renewable energy like wind power and solar power, along with a heightened commitment to energy conservation and energy efficiency. In October 1977, The Atlantic ran a cover story on Lovins' ideas. Residential solar energy technologies are prime examples of soft energy technologies and rapid deployment of simple, energy conserving, residential solar energy technologies is fundamental to a soft energy strategy. Lovins has described the "hard energy path" as involving inefficient energy use and centralized, non-renewable energy sources such as fossil fuels. He believes soft path impacts are more "gentle, pleasant and manageable," than hard path impacts. These impacts range from the individual and household level to those affecting the very fabric of society at the national and international level. Lovins on the Soft Path is a documentary film made by Amory and Hunter Lovins. It received "Best Science and Technology Film, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1983; Blue Ribbon, American Film Festival, 1982; Best of the Festival, Environmental Education Film Festival, 1982; Best Energy Film, International Environmental Film Festival, 1982; and Chris Bronze Plaque, Columbus International Film Festival, 1982." Nuclear power limitations Lovins wrote (as an attempt to balance the inherently intermittent nature of solar and wind) that nuclear power plants are intermittent in that they will sometimes fail unexpectedly, often for long periods of time. For example, in the United States, 132 nuclear plants were built, and 21% were permanently and prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems, while another 27% have at least once completely failed for a year or more. The remaining U.S. nuclear plants produce approximately 90% of their full-time full-load potential, but even they must shut down (on average) for about 1 out of each 18 months for scheduled refueling and maintenance. To cope with such intermittence by nuclear (and centralized fossil-fueled) power plants, utilities install a "reserve margin" of roughly 15% extra capacity spinning ready for instant use. Lovins also argues that nuclear plants have an additional disadvantage: for safety, they must instantly shut down in a power failure, but due to the inherent nuclear-physics of the systems, they can't be restarted quickly. For example, during the Northeast Blackout of 2003, nine operating U.S. nuclear units had to shut down temporarily. During the first three days after restarting, their output was less than 3% of normal. After twelve days of restart, their average capacity loss had.... Discover the Paul Hawken Amory Lovins L Hunter Lovins popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Paul Hawken Amory Lovins L Hunter Lovins books.