Winning the Oil Endgame

“Whalers ran out of customers before they ran out of whales.”

So reads the beginning slide in Amory Lovins’ hour-long “Winning the Oil Endgame” presentation at the Lied Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

That aphorism embodies the underlying premise of Lovins’ vision of a more environmentally benign future driven by a “Natural Capitalism” — which happens to also be the title of a book he co-authored — in which businesses aren’t coerced into compliance, but they actively lead change, driven by the profit potential of going green.

In the case of the collapse of the romantic, but brutal whaling industry of the mid-19th century, better, cheap alternatives appeared to supplant whale oil illumination; substitutes like coal oil, then kerosene and eventually electric lighting.

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