Green Energy Advocate Amory Lovins: Guru or Fakir?

[phantom power]

It's possible that there is such a thing as too many Amory Lovins posts. But there is only one way to find out...

The facts plainly show that Lovins has been consistently wrong about the ability of renewables to take large amounts of market-share from fossil fuels. He’s been proven wrong about the long-term ability of efficiency to reduce overall energy consumption. And yet, despite being so wrong for so long, he keeps getting awards and prizes by the forklift-load. And the fact that the Lovins love-fest continues unabated causes no small bit of antipathy among some long-time energy watchers. One of them is Vaclav Smil, the polymath and distinguished professor of geography at the University of Manitoba who has written numerous books on energy. “Inexplicably,” Smil wrote recently, Lovins “retains his guru aura no matter how wrong he is.”

Smil and others point out that Lovins has been wrong on numerous fronts. Four of Lovins’s claims are worth investigation.

1. Renewables will take huge swaths of the overall energy market. (1976)
2. Electricity consumption will fall. (1984)
3. Cellulosic ethanol will solve our oil import needs. (repeatedly)
4. Efficiency will lower consumption. (repeatedly)

http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=676

[bananas]

1. BWAHAHAHA!!!! What a load of bullshit!!!!

Apparently this nnutcase thinks we took the soft energy path under Raygun:

Indeed, a close look at the Foreign Affairs article points up the difference between Lovins’s rhetoric and reality. The piece predicted that if the U.S. were to embrace Lovins’s vision, by around 2005 more than a third of the country’s energy would be coming from “soft technologies,” which Lovins defined in part as relying “on renewable energy flows that are always there….such as sun and wind and vegetation.” Fossil fuels were not mentioned in any of his definitions of “soft” technologies.

So how did Lovins’s prediction turn out? This graphic from the Government Accountability Office provides a useful comparison, covering the period just before Lovins’s piece in Foreign Affairs, to 2004.

What an idiot - we DIDN'T follow the soft energy path!

[NickB79]

6. So, has ANYTHING Lovin predicted come true yet?

As much as this Bryce character looks like a moron (and he does), was he mistaken in pointing out that Lovin's predictions have NOT come to pass? Or am I just not seeing the massive solar and wind farms on my drive to work in my plug-in hybrid powered by cellulosic ethanol?

Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then, ya know.

[NNadir]

11. Yes, nuclear power has ceased to provide energy on earth.

Lovins wrote a long, boring, turgid, paranoid article in 1980 saying how nuclear energy was in its death throes. He was dead spot on (acid maybe):

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

Another Lovins 1976 prediction: Everybody would have a molten salt solar storage bath in their backyard.

Oh, and there's this good one that is absolutely true: The hydrogen hypercar will be in showrooms by 2005. This wonderful Lovinism was included in the 2001 issue of National Geographic

Lovins is just a highly paid (off) yuppie brat who functions to help other consumer brat turkeys keep their lies to themselves and to everyone else above water.

For the right fee he'll Greenwash anything. His owners have included not only Enron and Royal Dutch Shell, but a bunch of other companies of equal moral stature.

His ethical level is pretty typical of what one sees with anti-nukes.

[kestrel91316]

15. You forgot to call him illiterate, BTW.

Oh, and you forgot to mention that the rest of us environmentalists are illiterate, too. And brats.

[NNadir]

19. I over looked that. It goes without saying of course that Lovins either can't or won't read.

Only a completely illiterate person would, in these days, oppose the world's largest, by far, form of climate change gas free energy.

Of course, it doesn't matter whether Lovins can read or not, though there's tremendous evidence that, being an anti-nuke, he can't understand what the "greater than" and "less than" signs mean, can't use equations, like those in the many, many, many, recent scientific publications on life cycle analysis, because he is a paid liar - a highly paid liar, a corporate stooge with no honor and no decency.

There is a nice review article in Energy, the scientific journal that is not legal at Greenpeace services, on the greenhouse external cost of electricity. Weisser, Energy 32 (2007) 1543–1559 "A guide to life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from electric
supply technologies." I searched the article to see if the illiterate Amory Lovins was quoted anywhere as a reference. Nope. This is really not suprising. One wouldn't expect Pat Robertson to be cited in an evolutionary biology paper either.

There is NOT ONE anti-nuke that I have met who I would consider has even a remote familiarity with energy issues. They're all yuppie brats who want to fill out a form to make it seem as if they care about the environment. In fact, they couldn't care less about the environment which is why they not only take pride in talking endlessly when in fact action is needed, but they deliberately and viciously set out to kill people by vandalizing the infrastructure that makes the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy. Now they are trying to hurt my children, by organizing an international stupidity festival to shut Oyster Creek's nuclear reactor, a reactor that produces more energy than all the solar yuppie brat toys in this country.

And of course, the paid off creep Lovins bears responsibility for all of the deaths that will be associated with Germany's importation of South African Coal. I have a few papers available from the literature on the number of deaths resulting from freighters, including the one's that will haul the South African coal to Germany.

Heckuva job, anti-nukes, heckuva job.

Why not have a nice glass of Allen's Coffee Brandy to celebrate your big victory?

[bananas]

13. Yes - 'The outcome was close enough to Lovins' prediction that "everyone had to admit ...

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2002/05/13/322890/index.htm

<snip>

With Lovins advising, Weinberg arranged for the construction of a superefficient house in suburban Davis, Calif., that has an ordinary look and feel. After rigorous analysis, PG&E reported in 1996 that the house consumes 52% less energy than a typical new one, and at the same time cost $4,490 less to build. The outcome was close enough to Lovins' prediction that "everyone had to admit he was more right than wrong," says Weinberg.

<snip>

[NickB79]

17. So most new homes built in California are superefficient homes now?

One demonstration home means little if no one builds them commercially. How many of these homes have been built in California so far today?

[bananas]

2. "Inconvenient Corrections - Al Gore's Wacky Facts" by the same "journalist"

Listed right there on his web page:

http://www.robertbryce.com/

Inconvenient Corrections - Al Gore's Wacky Facts

October 16, 2007
Counterpunch.com

Facts don't matter. Only spin matters.
That's the main conclusion to be drawn from the fact that Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last week. My complaint has nothing to do with the science of global warming or whether or not the current warming of the planet is due solely to manmade causes. Rather, it's this: Gore won the prize even though his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, concludes with one of the most blatantly absurd statements ever committed to film.

By rbryce at Oct 19 2007 - 3:50pm
http://www.robertbryce.com/node/145

[NNadir]

12. It's always amusing to hear an anti-nuke speak of "facts."

I have spent much time here searching for a "fact" from an anti-nuke. They're very, very, very, very rare, if they exist at all.

Being an anti-nuke is a great business, when you consider the payoffs that Lovins, Schroeder, Caldicott, et al get, but many religions are great businesses. The primary thing about the anti-nuke culture is that it is religion.

It is full of blind worship, and demonization, and, like most religions, a healthy dollop of fear.

If Al Gore thinks that the world can be saved by renewable energy, he is wrong. He is not Jesus, not Mohammed, not Moses. In fact, there are many good doctors who can diagnose a cancer, for instance, without having any idea about how to cure it.

In fact, the anti-nuke religion is making climate change worse. It consistently opposes the world's largest, by far, form of climate change gas free energy. It couldn't care less about reality. It never has. It never will.

[jpak]

14. Dissing our Oscar Winning Nobel Laureate President Gore??

I hear Dick Cheney is a big fan of nuclear power - and the Nuclear Energy Institute just loves him up...

[bananas]

3. "I am an agnostic when it comes to the science of global climate change." - Robert Bryce

Another feature article on the front page of his website:

Let Them Eat Efficiency

December 2007
Energy Tribune
I am an agnostic when it comes to the science of global climate change. I’ve seen Al Gore’s movie and I’ve read reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I’ve also listened to the “skeptics.” I don’t know who’s right. And now that Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize, it seems that – at least for now – the skeptics are losing the public relations war. Whatever. For me, in some ways the science no longer matters, because it has become so politicized.
By rbryce at Nov 12 2007 - 2:42pm

[bananas]

4. Nuclear Shill Robert Bryce: Agnostic or Fakir?

[phantom power]

5. you should leave a few rounds in your clip...

just in case I post another one
:evilgrin:

[bananas]

7. Oh, there's lots more - for example the quote in your OP mentions Vaclav Smil

You peak-oilers will absolutely love this guy ... LOL!

http://transitionculture.org/?p=171

Catastrophist Apocalyptic Cultists of the World Unite…

Posted by Rob under Peak Oil

It has been a question for a while what those of us interested in peak oil and how the world might be beyond it should refer to ourselves as. Albert Bates of The Farm in the US coined the term ‘postpetroleumologists’. The PowerSwitch folks in London favour the term ‘peakniks’. I’m sure there are others, but now finally, the ideal term has been suggested. We are all, apparently, catastrophist apocalyptic cultists (kinda trips off the tongue doesn’t it?). That’s that cleared up then. A recent article by Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg entitled Peak Oil - a Catastrophist Cult and Complex Realities, accuses Peak Oilers of ‘deliberately alarmist arguments’ and of writing the obituaries of Western civilisation too soon.

Most of his arguments are the usual tired old tosh dished up by flat earth economists the world over to criticise peak oil. You know the kind of stuff, as oil becomes more expensive, the market will be spurred into action and will somehow magically come up with a new energy source as versatile as oil (an argument the Hirsch report kicks ably into the long grass), and that we’ve heard all this resource depletion stuff before, people have been predicting peak for centuries (surely as more information becomes available it means that we are able to make more precise predictions… ) .

<more>

[Kolesar]

8. Bryce wrong about displacement(s)

So how did Lovins’s prediction turn out? This graphic from the Government Accountability Office provides a useful comparison, covering the period just before Lovins’s piece in Foreign Affairs, to 2004.

As shown, the only energy source that has displaced any fossil fuel is nuclear power. And yet, Lovins still claims that nuclear power “continues to die of an incurable attack of market forces.”

Renewable energy is the same 6% of a much larger* gross energy usage after 31 years. Renewable energy has grown and it has displaced "something".

*From 75 Quads to 95 Quads according to Bryce

[Kolesar]

9. I finally figured out that it was Amory Lovins that Dick Cheney was making fun of ...

... in his infamous speech in 2001: "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is no basis for a sound energy policy".

I was thinking of starting a whole thread on this, but decided it was hardly worth it. It fits in here just as well.

My gripe with Lovins is that his writing uses unreferenced terms that I have never heard of. I can only guess the meaning out of context. And while I am trying to hold those terms in my mind, I grow weary and lose track of whatever it is Lovins is trying to say in those interminably long chapters that he writes. He just keeps piling on the facts and the details and expects them to be some brilliant, earth-shattering thesis. :boring:

There is another sound policy based on efficiency that will not increase gross consumption. It is to tax the energy sources as a means of steering people away from such consumption. People will eventually start spending less of their disposable income on energy-gulping luxuries.

[kestrel91316]

16. High prices for energy will ultimately function much as a tax would,

by deterring energy use (by all but the uber-wealthy, of course).

IMHO rationing is more democratic.

[Nihil]

18. One difference ...

> High prices for energy will ultimately function much as a tax would,
> by deterring energy use (by all but the uber-wealthy, of course).

... is that a tax would bring money into the state funds (theoretically
to be used to boost alternate solutions though I'm pretty cynical about
that happening) whereas high prices would only bring money into the
pockets of the energy companies. In both cases the money is being drawn
from the pockets of the general public and it is the general public who
will provide the demand destruction.

I'd second the proposal for rationing as being fairer but
1) The US is nowhere near the level of requiring that yet; and
2) The amount of time that such a proposal would take to become law
would render it pretty pointless as the supply/demand equation reacts
in a far quicker manner.

[Nihil]

10. In the words of Bernard Bresslaw ...

... "Fakir off!"

:evilgrin:

(Carry on up the Khyber)