Amory Lovins on Charlie Rose Amory's been on a roll, speaking up a storm. (My path crosses his at BSR a few weeks ago, and at Commonwealth Club in San Francisco next week - but that's just with my olimilmted movements.) Tonight he's on the Rose.
This just in from RMI:
Tonight, November 28, 2006, on most PBS stations, an interview with Amory Lovins, CEO and cofounder of RMI, will be featured on the Charlie Rose Show. In this interview, Amory responds to questions about how the U.S. can eliminate its dependence on oil through market-driven approaches. He talks about RMI's progress in several sectors-including heavy trucks, the military, light vehicles, biofuels, airplanes, and financial-in implementing recommendations made in RMI's Winning the Oil Endgame.
You'll be amazed at the progress RMI has made with Wal-Mart, the military, and states such as Hawaii and California.
For information on what station in your area carries the Charlie Rose Show, and for dates and times, please click here.
If you haven't heard Amory speak before, you owe it to yourself. He's a goldmine of knowledge, optimism and wit and data-based strategy that will leave you wondering why - if this makes so much sense - is our national policy so far from making sense.
From the Executive Summary:
Winning the Oil Endgame offers a coherent strategy for ending oil dependence, starting with the United States but applicable worldwide. There are many analyses of the oil problem. This synthesis is the first roadmap of the oil solution—one led by business for profit, not dictated by government for reasons of ideology. This roadmap is independent, peer-reviewed, written for business and military leaders, and co-funded by the Pentagon. It combines innovative technologies and new business models with uncommon public policies: market-oriented without taxes, innovation-driven without mandates, not dependent on major (if any) national legislation, and designed to support, not distort, business logic.
Why indeed?
The cornerstone of the next industrial revolution is therefore winning the Oil Endgame. And surprisingly, it will cost less to displace all of the oil that the United States now uses than it will cost to buy that oil. Oil's current market price leaves out its true costs to the economy, national security, and the environment. But even without including these now 'externalized' costs, it would still be profitable to displace oil completely over the next few decades. In fact, by 2025, the annual economic benefit of that displacement would be $130 billion gross (or $70 billion net of the displacement's costs). To achieve this does not require a revolution, but merely consolidating and accelerating trends already in place: the amount of oil the economy uses for each dollar of GDP produced, and the fuel efficiency of light vehicles, would need only to improve about three-fifths as quickly as they did in response to previous oil shocks.
What to do? Here's the prescription:
Saving half the oil America uses, and substituting cheaper alternatives for the other half, requires four integrated steps:
- Double the efficiency of using oil.
- Apply creative business models and public policies to speed the profitable adoption of superefficient light vehicles, heavy trucks, and airplane
- Provide another one-fourth of U.S. oil needs by a major domestic biofuels industry
- Save half the projected 2025 use of natural gas... then substitute part of the saved gas for oil
Make sense? Tune in. Invite your boss, suppliers, mayor and congressperson to tune in.
If you miss it tonight, there's always Google
3:02:07 PM 
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