Amory Lovins talking:
The old story about climate protection is that it’s costly, or it would have been done already. So government needs to make us do something painful to fix it. The new story about climate protection is that it’s not costly, but profitable. This was a simple sign error, because it’s cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel, as is well known to companies that do it all the time — for example, Dupont, SD micro electronics. Many other firms — IBM — are reducing their energy intensity routinely 6 percent a year by fixing up their plants, and they get their money back in two or three years. That’s called a profit.
Around 1850, one of the biggest US industries was whaling. And whale oil lit practically every building. But in the nine years before Drake struck oil, in 1859, at least five-sixths of that whale oil-illuminating market disappeared, thanks to fatal competitors, chiefly oil and gas made from coal, to which the whalers had not been paying attention. So, very unexpectedly, they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales. The remnant whale populations were saved by technological innovators and profit-maximizing capitalists.
So then of the energy that does get to the wheels, only an eighth of it, half of that, goes to heat the tires on the road, or to heat the air the car pushes aside. And only this little bit, only six percent actually ends up accelerating the car and then heating the brakes when you stop. In fact, since 95 percent of the weight you’re moving is the car not the driver, less than one percent of the fuel energy ends up moving the driver. This is not very gratifying after more than a century of devoted engineering effort.
In this eight-year period, 1977 to 85, when we last paid attention, the economy grew 27 percent, oil use fell 17 percent. Oil imports fell 50 percent. Oil imports from the Persian Gulf fell 87 percent. They would have been gone if we’d kept that up one more year. Well, that was with very old technologies and delivery methods.
[ted id=51]
– from ted.com
Read the book Winning the Oil Endgame