World is Green

The Rocky Mountain Institute has an interview with its’ co-founder Amory Lovins (Hat tip: Peak Energy)

What impact has RMI had over the past 25 years?
More than we often realize or dared to hope. We’ve created much of the
basic intellectual capital — in technology, policy, and business
strategy — that underpins natural capitalism (www.naturalcapitalism.org), the energy and water efficiency revolutions, green real-estate development, renewable energy, Factor Ten engineering (www.10xe.org), and profitable solutions to the oil (www.oilendgame.com), climate, and nuclear proliferation problems. We’ve been a key driver in saving over half the oil and natural gas, a sixth of the electricity, and two-thirds of the water that the U.S. now uses per dollar of GDP (vs. 1975), and similarly in dozens of nations.

Our syntheses of new approaches to energy, cars, hydrogen, security, and several other fields are starting to be adopted. Our reframings — end-use/least-cost, the right size for the job, resilience — now informmany disciplines.

Hundreds of our alumni/ae are making important contributions. And thousands of people I meet all over the world say we’ve inspired them to rekindle hope and commit to action.

How would you contrast the issues and methods of RMI in its early years with the work it does now?
We’ve become more disciplined without losing our spark, more capable
without losing our agility. We’ve gotten better at aikido politics,
more astute about how to harness causality and influence, and far more
deeply engaged with commerce as our prime instrument of outreach and
effectiveness. Now we’re poised for a whole new level of effectiveness.

What do you see as the best strategy RMI can undertake to ensure that its ideas go to scale in the market?

So far we’ve implemented our efficiency concepts mainly by helping early
private-sector adopters succeed so conspicuously that their rivals are
forced by competitive pressure to follow suit or lose share. We’ve
begun to use the “demand pull” of huge organizations like Wal-Mart and News Corporation to change wider market behavior. We’ve begun to get better at injecting new business models into troubled industries at critical moments, to practice institutional acupuncture, and to inform the enormously powerful private capital market. But we’re always seeking more and better trimtabs.

Our biggest puzzle is how to make natural capitalism (www.naturalcapitalism.org)
into a beneficial social virus that propagates itself exponentially
with network mathematics, rather than our having to introduce it to one
company at a time, which works well but isn’t fast enough.