Amory Lovins

Brian Mark: In your opinion, should national and international policymakers set minimum standards and targets to drive reduction in human-generated CO2 emissions?

Amory Lovin: Yes, though it's more important to do what we call "barrier busting" [eg overcoming resistance to new methods or technologies], to enable people to respond to the advantages offered by new processes. That's more important than getting the price right.

If no minimum standards and targets are set by policy-makers, how quickly do you expect the market to respond?

I think the market will surprise us by how quickly it responds - and is already responding. But it's not just the market, the many actors in business, society and government all have a role. In the US, for example, the local government commitments alone [to reducing emissions] probably approach, and may even exceed, one Kyoto obligation - and if you add the commitments and activities in the private sector relating to energy efficiency and lower-carbon supply, you've probably got well over a Kyoto commitment. We don't know the numbers for sure because no one's counting them, but I can tell you the companies that are paying attention, such as IBM and Dupont, are cutting their energy intensity by 6% a year.

Do you think that the market is able to respond in a globally competitive way when there are such apparent differences between developing and developed nations in terms of labour rates, employment conditions and limits to maximum environmental impact ?

I think the similarities between developing and developed nations are probably more important than the differences. China, for example, has set energy efficiency as its top development priority because it can't afford to develop without making use of energy efficient technologies - the supply side would eat the budget.

I think we also need to remember that in an increasingly flattened global economy, there are many important sources of competitive advantage besides reduced energy bills. One is the macro allocation of capital - if you invest in factories to make, say, compact fluorescent lamps, it will take about a thousand times less capital than expanding the supply of electricity to do the same thing with inefficient lamps.

Moreover, the side benefits of efficient buildings are often worth a lot more than the energy savings themselves. For example, 6-16% higher labour productivity in efficient offices because of better thermal, visual and acoustic comfort and better air quality; 40% higher retail sales in well-ventilated shops; 20%-plus faster learning in well-ventilated schools. No economy of any character can afford to ignore such factors.

How can we change the way that projects are procured to achieve sustainable development via speculative developers, when those funding construction cannot share in the advantages of efficient operation?

In terms of public policy, I think the most helpful approach would probably be fee bates on your buildings. That is a fee or a rebate, the size of which depends on how efficient the building is in terms of its use of electricity, gas, water, etc. This ought to be charged at the time of connection and announced in advance, so that it can affect the developer's design choices. This will internalise the cost of inefficiency when it matters - not when it's too late.

But I think we actually need more than that. We need to tackle the perfectly perverse incentive seen by participants in the property value chain, especially commercial property, each of whom is systematically rewarded for inefficiency and penalised for efficiency.

This should start with the way we pay our design professionals for what they spend or what they save. Now that could be fixed either by clients procuring design services based on performance, or skilled firms bidding their services, putting themselves either at risk of underperformance or benefiting from overperformance compared with pre-agreed standard based on post-commissioned measurement.

The market failures in the property value chain are so pervasive in both our countries that by 1990, for example, the US had already misallocated a trillion dollars of capital, (a million, million dollars) to about 200 million tonnes of air conditioning equipment requiring about 200 GW (at peak) of power to run it. We wouldn't have bought that in the first instance if we had optimally designed the buildings to give the best comfort at the least cost.

In terms of energy supply, do you feel that the future lies with a decentralised approach, giving rise to smaller scale technology solutions, or is it preferable to centralise with larger-scale solutions?

It's no good being doctrinarial about what's the right size, because it depends on the task. Decentralised provision of energy can be advantageous in many circumstances and I think many people in the power industry don't yet understand the attributes, let alone the advantages, of distributed power systems.

Nuclear build would worsen climate change because it is so much dearer than implementing electric efficiencies, CHP and certain renewables. It would buy less climate solution per pound spent

The City is starting to note, however, that big, slow projects have a greater financial risk than small, fast ones. Renewables do command a price premium, but you need to look at the long-term picture: they offer a fixed price supply, protecting from fuel price volatility and associated financial risk and cost. The financial markets start to appreciate some of these hidden values long before the policy makers .

I think micropower (worldwide) surpassed nuclear power (worldwide) in capacity in 2002 and in output in 2005. Nuclear simply costs too much, with too great a financial risk and so is being far eclipsed in the market by smaller, faster, cheaper options.

There is a strong drive for planning policy in Britain to be prescriptive about requiring building-integrated renewable technologies and concern that this misses possible economies of scale using larger installations - particularly wind turbines.

It will in general make more sense to have large wind turbines where the wind is, than small turbines attached to buildings, where you inevitably get into structural vibration noise issues and lower wind speed. The economies of integration and small scale are often more important for photovoltaics and you can go either way on CHP.

There are speculative builders in the US who offer building-integrated photovoltaics as an option, or in one case as standard, on homes, and there are some new houses that have just been built that save 60% of the energy compared to the strictest US standard (California Title 24). They use some of the saved capital expenditure from downsizing or eliminating mechanicals to pay for a photovoltaic roof integrated power supply, resulting in a total cost equivalent to a conventional house.

It's a very good financial proposition, all rolled into the initial financing, and I would hope the planners or those designing marketing incentives would pay more attention to making buildings super efficient.

Do you believe that nuclear power is now a necessary evil following the recent statement by James Lovelock? [Professor James Lovelock has said that nuclear power is the only green solution].

No. I have a great respect for James Lovelock, but actually new nuclear build would worsen climate change because it is so much dearer than [implementing] electric efficiencies, CHP and certain renewables. It would buy less climate solution per pound spent.

Do you think that focusing so heavily on CO2 emissions is appropriate, given that other human generated greenhouse gases such as methane may also be having a significant effect?

You need to focus on all of them. Some, like methane and the halocarbons, are actually very much worse per molecule - 21 times or so in the case of methane, for example - than CO2, so you get a lot more climate leverage by abating those emissions and it's often easier to do so.

As a matter of fact, many abatements will catch multiple greenhouse gases. You can, for example, use a super efficient vacuum insulated fridge to get rid of the refrigerant and blowing agent climate risks and at the same time you eliminate most of the power plant CO2 to run the fridge.

How optimistic are you for the future?

An optimist sees the glass as half full, the pessimist as half empty and the engineer says "it's not 100%, is it?". Optimism and pessimism are two different faces of the same simplistic surrender to fatalism. I'm quite pleased with how rapidly consciousness is growing, particularly in the business and design community, about what can be done [to alleviate climate change], what we need to do and how much more fun and profitable it's will be to do it. But this is a 50-year project, so one requires relentless patience and I think we'd be ill-served by assuming everything will turn out alright without effort, or will go badly regardless. As Raymond Williams remarked, to be truly radical is to make hope possible, not despair convincing.

I think in many respects, we're now getting on the right track - and the rediscovery of Victorian integrated engineering will make one of the greatest contributions. There is nothing in the universe as powerful as six billion minds around a problem. Evolution has equipped us to meet any challenges, including those of our own making, and it would be odd if we'd got this far only to find we were too stupid to apply the knowledge we've got to save our own skins. Fortunately brains are evenly distributed, one per person, so we each know our responsibility.