Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?

Amory B. Lovins

From Foreign Affairs, October 1976

Article preview: first 500 of 13,739 words total.

Summary:  Where are America's formal or de facto energy policies leading us? Where might we choose to go instead? How can we find out?

Amory B. Lovins, a consultant physicist, is British Representative of Friends of the Earth, Inc. His latest books are World Energy Strategies: Facts, Issues, and Options and (with Dr. J. H. Price) Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost

Where are America's formal or de facto energy policies leading us? Where might we choose to go instead? How can we find out?

Addressing these questions can reveal deeper questions-and a few answers-that are easy to grasp, yet rich in insight and in international relevance. This paper will seek to explore such basic concepts in energy strategy by outlining and contrasting two energy paths that the United States might follow over the next 50 years-long enough for the full implications of change to start to emerge. The first path resembles present federal policy and is essentially an extrapolation of the recent past. It relies on rapid expansion of centralized high technologies to increase supplies of energy, especially in the form of electricity. The second path combines a prompt and serious commitment to efficient use of energy, rapid development of renewable energy sources matched in scale and in energy quality to end-use needs, and special transitional fossil-fuel technologies. This path, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, diverges radically from incremental past practices to pursue long-term goals.

Both paths, as will be argued, present difficult-but very different-problems. The first path is convincingly familiar, but the economic and sociopolitical problems lying ahead loom large, and eventually, perhaps, insuperable. The second path, though it represents a shift in direction, offers many social, economic and geopolitical advantages, including virtual elimination of nuclear proliferation from the world. It is important to recognize that the two paths are mutually exclusive. Because commitments to the first may foreclose the second, we must soon choose one or the other-before failure to stop nuclear proliferation has foreclosed both.1

II

Most official proposals for future U.S. energy policy embody the twin goals of sustaining growth in energy consumption (assumed to be closely and causally linked to GNP and to social welfare) and of minimizing oil imports. The usual proposed solution is rapid expansion of three sectors: coal (mainly strip-mined, then made into electricity and synthetic fluid fuels); oil and gas (increasingly from Arctic and offshore wells); and nuclear fission (eventually in fast breeder reactors). All domestic resources, even naval oil reserves, are squeezed hard-in a policy which David Brower calls "Strength Through Exhaustion." Conservation, usually induced by price rather than by policy, is conceded to be necessary but it is given a priority more rhetorical than real. "Unconventional" energy supply is relegated to a minor role, its significant contribution postponed until past 2000. Emphasis is overwhelmingly on the short term. Long-term sustainability is vaguely assumed to be ensured by some eventual combination of fission breeders, fusion breeders, and solar electricity. Meanwhile, aggressive subsidies and regulations are used to hold down energy prices well below economic and prevailing international levels so that growth will not be seriously constrained.

Even over the next ten years (1976-85), the supply enterprise typically proposed in such projections is ...

End of preview: first 500 of 13,739 words total.