CON GAMES: Lefty Amory Lovins Right From The Start

August 13th, 2007 at 06:00am Michael Conniff 2

BASALT, COLORADO–They came in peace but they left in a Prius.

At the Peace Ranch parking lot here Saturday night, one Prius after another was stacked up and ready for lift-off, like so many carbonizers at the Indianapolis 500. The Priuses in question–is that the plural of Prius?–were shiny, new, and righteous, for they were ready to transport the thousands of people who wended their way to one of the more remote corners of Basalt for the RMI:25 celebration of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the “think and do tank” so green it leaves rivals green with envy. And what better place for a hybrid than a hoe-down where the back-patting for what RMI has wrought was nothing less than thunderous?

Like one of those old Republican conferences on family values, the RMI celebration would drive those on the other side of the debate absolutely bonkers. Just a few years ago, conservatives like Bill Bennett would come to Aspen to tell the assembled: “We won”–meaning the conservative movement was now officially triumphant. Any liberal underneath the roof of the Peace Ranch would have to conclude the opposite–that the liberals have finally won because they never quite gave up on the issue of the environment.

RMI founder, chairman, and chief scientist Amory Lovins was way up there on high on the stage with Tom Friedman, the ubiquitously peripatetic sooth who likes to say what’s fit to print in The New York Times. If “green is the new red, white, and blue,” as Friedman will argue in one of his insta-books, then Lovins is freakin’ Benjamin Franklin on ‘roids.

Conservatives have to hate Amory Lovins if only because he looks so much like a liberal geek. He’s impish and gnomish and smarter than you are. His pockets are famously stuffed with rocket calculators, gadgets, and more pens than even a scientist on a bender could possibly need. But conservatives also have to hate Amory Lovins because he has been right from the start.

The green stuff has gone from being politically extinct to becoming politically extant everywhere, in large part because Lovins and the policy geeks in Old Snowmass have insisted from the start that you could build an economy devoid of oil if the nation developed solar, hydro, wind, and sundry alternatives. That’s happening now, but it’s only happening because people like Lovins, Ray Anderson of Interface, and the cast of thousands assembled in peace at the ranch fought like hell for what they believed in.

They were laughed at and marginalized as “tree huggers” and “environmental wackos” but the labels never stuck to Lovins or his peeps. Then came the Iraq war and a Texas oilman saying we are “addicted to oil” in a State of the Union speech. Then Al Gore got an iPod and “An Inconvenient Truth” after Hurricane Katrina washed away most of the doubters. And there was the data to consider–data going back thousands of years that says some of us had better like it hot or climate will become a lump of coal in our Christmas stocking if we don’t do something about it like yesterday.

Up on the stage, Lovins said two distinct car projects at RMI were both “coming up trumps,” and he trumpeted the world’s ability to cut energy consumption 8 percent to bring us back to a sustainable world. At the Peace Ranch Saturday night, anything and everything seemed possible once you got behind the wheel of your Prius.

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