APS: Save us from ourselves
Amory Lovins, leading energy conservation expert, appears somewhat less worried about conserving trees. He thrusts papers and books at everyone he meets. Ask a question at a press briefing and he chucks you a paper (fortunately he’s a good throw). So what’s the message behind the missiles?
It’s certainly hard not to be impressed by the facts and figures that Lovins has amassed. The Rocky Mountain Institute he founded in Snowmass, Colorado has documented in detail the inefficiencies of the energy sector, from waste heat at power plants to poorly designed consumer electronics that waste energy even when switched off. The engineering solutions RMI proposes for each energy challenge are equally impressive, from smart home insulation to ultralight cars made from carbon fibre composites.
But some of the RMI solutions make you wonder, why doesn’t everyone already do that? For me that's the hardest question to answer. Figuring out why humans make bad decisions, and continue to make bad decisions, in the face of sometimes overwhelming evidence, may be as big a part of the energy challenge as finding the right technology.
As far as I can tell we’re just not very good at making decisions about lifecycle costs (energy savings from compact fluorescent light bulbs, say) versus the sticker price (cheaper incandescent bulbs). And technologies that need to be ‘pushed’ on the market, rather than being ‘pulled’ by what people want, are understandably less attractive to businesses. Perhaps there are marketing experts and social scientists out there with answers to those questions.