Amory Lovins: A 40-year plan for energy

He said no government programs, yet by 6:50 he's praising feebates. I stopped watching there because if this guy can't prevent himself from lying over the course of 7 minutes, nothing he has to say in the remaining 20 minutes is worth listening to.

barely plausible, and highly unlikely. almost sounds like a politians speech.

I approve of this message :)

8:25 I see a new episode of My Strange Addiction coming soon

GROUND ALL AIR TRAFFIC .. WE KNOW IT WORKS TO CLEAN THE AIR -- PROVEN IN THE DAYS AFTER 911 .. #AVIATIONPOLLUTION IS THE MAJOR PROBLEM ..

That comment at 12:10 about oil reaching a peak in demand rather than supply is total rubbish, oil demand will continue to rise because our population is growing, not to mention the fact that developing countries like china are using up more and more of the fossil fuel to maintain their economic growth. They have a right to want to be richer, but if we all lived like Americans we would need 6 times more oil, sounds depressing but it is the simple truth.
Not saying all of this TED presentation is bullshit but Amory needs to get his facts right.

Compared to what we're actually doing, this is incredibly optimistic ... makes me wish I knew who to kick to get these plans going into motion ...

Somebody knows what is the character font that is used in his presentation?!

Thanks for sharing! -- And for your work.


The naysayers on this thread remind me that cynicism is an easy rationale for inaction. Much of what we call "apathy" is really a state of despair at the lack of leadership and hopeful paths forward. Lovins' vision is promising.  Is he promising too much?  -- Or just challenging us to pull our heads out of this tar pit and realize we actually do have choices and don't have to just sit here and go extinct?  Why not be part of the solution and lend a hand?  What exactly is there to lose?  If the theory's not perfect, what are you doing to improve on it?

I think we owe it to future generations do our best to see what's possible.  It's time to lead, follow or get out of the way!

Actually the downtime for nuclear and coal is typically planned for purposes of maintenance and refueling. That is completely different than wind and solar that turn on and off randomly on their own... How can such an educated man get basic facts so wrong?!?!?

It would be nice to have a now simplified presentation with links to implementation for average citizens.

"The new fire is flameless."

I love this idea but now think what it would coust to a constry to do this chances in terms of money and mind changing.While changing not after

There is a fundamental flaw in Lovins theory of saving energy, Saving energy is like saving money: everytime you invent a new way of saving money or energy you come up with 10 new things to use it on and has been the case over and over again.

just not gonna happen though is it

A big thumbs down! This talk is an outrage, loaded with misleading information, false assumptions and general gibberish. I liked the first 3 minutes but when he said we wouldn't need nuclear energy I knew there was a problem with his thinking. He's your typical efficiency pipe dream preacher. His charts at 10:30 can only lower today's oil usage, not eliminate all the increased usage predicted by 2050. "We can allow smart and lucrative growth models that help people already be near where they want to be so they don't need to go somewhere else." What does that even mean???

He said in 40 years we could be using no oil without saying how we could eliminate oil. Wal-Mart didn't use electric trucks and I doubt they could for another 2 decades. I think he's vastly overestimating the potential of bio fuels (ignoring large land mass required), he also said we could use natural gas for vehicles but that's still a CO2-emitting fossil fuel! "World oil use could peak around 2016." I highly doubt that. Do you know how many more people in developing countries are getting cars? Cheap cars, not hybrids or electric vehicles! I agree that electric vehicles are a great advancement and will be a big player in the clean energy economy.

He said energy production will be a disruption but only suggests renewables like solar. Solar is NOT a disruption, it's barely a drop in the bucket, and oil companies know it. That's why they have no problem promoting solar (for good PR) but they bash nuclear because it's the only threat to their business. He said energy use in the U.S. could decline due to advances in efficiency but I highly doubt that considering that advances have been made continually throughout history yet consumption has continued to rise. Painting an optimistic brush over the U.S. landscape is also ignoring the bigger picture, the rest of the world particularly developing nations and China which are accelerating energy use in their own industrial revolutions.

He said renewable capacity surpassed nuclear in 2010, but the keyword is capacity which is not the same as output. Greens love to quote big "capacity" numbers for solar and wind farms but they don't quote real world output which is significantly less for wind and solar. Solar PV has a capacity factor of 10-20% in the desert, concentrated solar about 30%, and wind is 20-40% (U.S. figures from Wikipedia). Compare that to U.S. nuclear capacity factor - which is 90%. When a 1 GW nuclear power plant is constructed, it actually produces close to 1 GW (about 900 MW) and actually puts it into the grid. Wind and solar are only working 1/5 of the time. I'll take 11% downtime over 90% downtime any day. Nuclear power plants very rarely shut down "without warning," they are shut down once every couple of years to examine and redistribute the fuel pellets.

The grid should be converted to a "smart grid" over time, but 6 trillion dollars of investment can hardly be labeled "business as usual." We don't have time to overhaul our energy grid before implementing massive clean energy solutions, we need to implement them now. We need advanced nuclear reactors to bridge the gap to 2050 and beyond. 

The speaker concluded with typical green's idealistic gibberish not rooted in reality: "We humans are inventing a new fire, not dug from below, but flowing from above... not local, but everywhere... not costly, but free." Let me explain reality to you mister speaker. EVERYTHING has cost. Your beautiful mystical solar energy causes skin cancer and burns my skin any time I'm outside for too long. Capturing solar energy requires a lot of materials, construction, ongoing maintenance and worst of all, HUGE land area that must be displaced from the ecosystem to generate power on a large scale. I find it tragic that a business man who is presumably rooted in science and numbers could be so far out of touch with the reality of the energy and climate issues we face today. I hope enough people will see the hype for what it is and support real, practical, large scale energy solutions with a small geographic footprint that can go where they are needed. We need Gen 4 nuclear reactors like LFTRs to do the heavy lifting. To think that renewables can do it alone is a ridiculous pipe dream!

"Quintuple efficiency airplanes" what a load of crap.

Anyone else notice that at about 2:30 he said "we can eliminate our addiction to oil and coal", then the symbols for oil, coal and nuclear disappeared? 

Wow !  That's awesome.  I don't think I've ever called anything a 'must see' before, but the world would probably grow in a better direction if everyone watched that.
  Excellent.