Amory Lovins Quotes
We've got 21st century technology and speed colliding head-on with 20th and 19th century institutions, rules and cultures.
Fire made us human, fossil fuels made us modern, but now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable.
Nature does not compromise; a pelican is not a compromise between a crow and otter, it is just a pelican. Nature makes no compromises; any inefficient products are recalled to the manufacturer!
Energy-saving technologies keep improving faster than they're applied, so efficiency is an ever larger and cheaper resource.
I'm a practitioner of elegant frugality. I don't feel comfortable telling other people what to do, so I just try and lead by example.
I once met an economist who believed that everything was fungible for money, so I suggested he enclose himself in a large bell-jar with as much money as he wanted and see how long he lasted.
If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.
The barriers that renewables and efficiency face come less from our living in a capitalist market economy and more from not taking market economics seriously.
Economies are supposed to serve human ends.. not the other way round. We forget at our peril that markets make a good servant, a bad master and a worse religion.
I am a man without a furnace. My windows are insulated by 19 sheets of glass which cost less than installing a heating system.
By skimping on design, the owner gets costlier equipment, higher energy costs, and a less competitive and comfortable building; the tenants get lower productivity and higher rent and operating costs.
Many business leaders are asking fundamental questions about what business they're in, why they are doing it and how it can be used as a means of healing human and natural communities.
We'd find more energy in the attics of American homes (through energy conservation measures) than in all the oil buried in Alaska.
Rely on renewable energy flows that are always there whether we use them or not, such as, sun, wind and vegetation: on energy income, not depletable energy capital.
The reason the U.S. lags so badly is that we have obsolete rules that favor big over small, supply over efficiency, and incumbents over new market entrants.
Many analysts now regard modest, zero, or negative growth in our rate of energy use as a realistic long-term goal.
Nuclear power has died of an incurable attack of market forces and is way beyond any hope of revival, because the competitors are several-fold cheaper and are getting rapidly more so.
A package of 35 improvements to typical industrial motor systems can save around 50% of their metered energy…with a simple payback under 16 months.