Amory Lovins

Most of his remaining family are believed to have been killed by German Nazis in the 1941 Tarashcha massacre.

Amory Bloch Lovins (born November 13, 1947) is an American writer, physicist, and former chairman/chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

In 1964, Lovins entered Harvard College as a National Merit Scholar.

After two years there, he transferred to Oxford.

Each summer from 1965 to 1981, Lovins guided mountaineering trips and photographed the White Mountains of New Hampshire, contributing photographs to At Home in the Wild: New England's White Mountains.

In 1969, he became a junior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford, as a result of which he had a temporary Oxford master of arts status.

During the early 1970s, Lovins became interested in resource policy, especially energy policy.

He left without a degree in 1971, because the university would not allow him to pursue a doctorate in energy.

In 1971, he wrote about Wales' endangered Snowdonia National Park in the book, Eryri, the Mountains of Longing, commissioned by David Brower, president of Friends of the Earth.

Lovins spent about a decade as British representative for Friends of the Earth.

The 1973 energy crisis helped create an audience for his writing and an essay originally penned as a U.N. paper grew into his first book concerned with energy, World Energy Strategies (1973).

His next book was Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy (1975), co-authored with John H. Price.

in 1976.

Lovins argued that the United States had arrived at an important crossroads and could take one of two paths.

The first, supported by U.S. policy, promised a future of steadily increasing reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear fission, and had serious environmental risks.

The alternative, which Lovins called "the soft path", favored "benign" sources of renewable energy like wind power and solar power, along with a heightened commitment to energy conservation and energy efficiency.

In October 1977, The Atlantic ran a cover story on Lovins' ideas.

Residential solar energy technologies are prime examples of soft energy technologies and rapid deployment of simple, energy conserving, residential solar energy technologies is fundamental to a soft energy strategy.

Lovins has described the "hard energy path" as involving inefficient energy use and centralized, non-renewable energy sources such as fossil fuels.

By 1978, Lovins had published six books and consulted widely.

Lovins served in 1980 and 1981 on the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Research Advisory Board, and from 1999 to 2001 and 2006 to 2008 on Defense Science Board task forces on military energy efficiency and strategy.

His visiting academic chairs most recently included a visiting professorship in Stanford University's school of engineering.

Lovins moved to London to pursue his energy work, and returned to the United States in 1981.

He settled in western Colorado in 1982.

Lovins' four grandparents emigrated to the United States from small villages lying between Kyiv and Odesa in Ukraine in the early 20thcentury.

In 1982, he and his wife, Hunter Lovins founded Rocky Mountain Institute, based in Snowmass, Colorado.

Together with a group of colleagues, the Lovinses fostered efficient resource use and sustainable development.

Lovins clients have included many Fortune 500 companies, real-estate developers, and utilities.

Public-sector clients have included the OECD, UN, Resources for the Future, many national governments, and 13 US states.

Since 1982, RMI has grown into a broad-based "think-and-do tank" with more than 600 staff and an annual budget over $120 million.

RMI has spun off five for-profit companies.

Amory Lovins published an article in Foreign Affairs called "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?"

In the 1990s, his work with Rocky Mountain Institute included the design of an ultra-efficient automobile, the Hypercar.

He has provided expert testimony and published 31 books, including Reinventing Fire, Winning the Oil Endgame, Small is Profitable, Brittle Power, and Natural Capitalism.

Lovins was born in Washington, DC.

His father, Gerald H. Lovins worked as an engineer and his mother, Miriam Lovins, worked as a social services administrator.

Lovins is the brother of Julie Beth Lovins, a computational linguist who wrote the first stemming algorithm for word matching.

He has written on energy policy and related areas for four decades, and served on the US National Petroleum Council, an oil industry lobbying group, from 2011 to 2018.

Lovins has promoted energy efficiency, the use of renewable energy sources, and the generation of energy at or near the site where the energy is actually used.

Lovins has also advocated a "negawatt revolution" arguing that utility customers don't want kilowatt-hours of electricity; they want energy services.