Amory Lovins: Freeing America from its addiction to oil

Snowmass, Colorado (CNN) — Oil is on its way out. That journey will take several decades, but it’s begun. Mindful markets and civil society will complete it as inexorably as innovators and capitalists got America off whale-oil lamps in the 1850s.

My 2005 TED talk explained how to get the United States completely off oil by the 2040s, led by business for profit. This would cost an average of about $15 per barrel in 2000 dollars, or about $18 per barrel in 2009 dollars — less than a third of oil’s current price, conservatively assuming that all its environmental, security and other “external” costs (paid in taxes, illness or insecurity rather than at the pump) are worth zero. The Pentagon-co-sponsored September 2004 study Winning the Oil Endgame by the Rocky Mountain Institute details how.

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