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Amory Lovins may be the most important individual on the face of the planet when it comes to energy and sustainability. He believes we can revolutionize our economy and sidestep the many limits that are threatening to squeeze the life out of our future.

JG:
Do you feel capitalism in its current form will be sustainable over the long term?

AL:
Capitalism is the productive use of reinvestment in capital. Yet so far, industrial capitalism has dealt seriously with only two forms of capital—money and goods—while liquidating and not valuing two even more important sources of capital: nature and people. This “unnatural capitalism” defies its own logic. If instead we play with a full deck, productively using and reinvesting in all four forms of capital, we will make more money and have more fun. But we mustn’t ask the marketplace to do things it is not meant to do and not capable of doing. Markets are very good at the short-term allocation of scarce resources, but markets are meant to be efficient, not sufficient, and greedy, not fair. They don’t tell us how much is enough. They don’t tell us the whole purpose of a human being. And they certainly cannot substitute for politics, ethics, or faith. We must always remember that markets make a splendid servant, a bad master, and a worse religion. I am therefore not an economic fundamentalist: I take markets seriously, not literally.

JG:
Is it possible to decouple increased physical inputs into the economy from continued economic growth, so that economic growth is sustainable in the long term using less stuff?

AL:
This is not only possible; it’s routine. The US in 2006 used 52 per cent less oil, 57 per cent less natural gas, and about two-thirds less water per dollar of GDP than in 1975, and has radically improved many other kinds of resource productivity. We can do that many times more with no end in sight. Attentive companies have lately cut their energy intensity six to eight percent a year with handsome returns, typically two or three-year paybacks. There are some ultimate limits to this process but I think they are extremely far off. And that does not even count the further promise of things like nanotechnology for molecular assembly.

JG:
What does a sustainable energy future look like and how do we go about creating it?