This Day in History: 1947-11-13

Amory Lovins born this day in 1947. A nuclear physicist, Lovins founded the Rocky Mountain Institute and is best known for promoting energy conservation and the “soft” energy path. He argues that nuclear power and fossil fuels are inefficient and expensive, taking away thousands of jobs that would otherwise have been created in cheaper energy efficiency projects. In a 2013 New York Times interview, Lovins said that solving environmental and energy problems “is not really going to require international agreements so much as it’ll be driven by the private sector and civil society in co-evolution, sped by military innovation – in other words spread by effective institutions and end-running the ineffective ones.”