US Could stop using oil by 2050 IF…..

MSN Money Central

By Scott Burns

Yes, says visionary Amory Lovins. So long as we get serious about improving energy efficiency. The cost? $180 billion over 10 years!

LESS THEN THE IRAQ WAR TODAY!!!!! — guest
Nearly 30 years ago Amory Lovins took on the utility industry. The industry was predicting a high-energy future filled with nuclear power plants. Lovins called the utility forecasts “the hard path” because they committed us to producing ever more energy. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Lovins suggested an alternative, “Soft Energy Paths.”

Lovins pointed out that the least expensive, safest and most secure energy we could acquire wouldn’t come from more drilling and more nuclear power plants. It would come from using energy more efficiently. Rather than the hard work of raising the bridge, he suggested the easier work of lowering the water. All we had to do was to make cars, trucks, houses and buildings more energy efficient. That, he wrote, would eliminate the need to build more nuclear power plants and to search the planet for new sources of hydrocarbons.

Lovins — ridiculed as a dreamer at the time — was right. The conventional wisdom was wrong. Energy efficiency in the next decade reduced our oil consumption so fast, it broke the pricing power of OPEC and crushed oil prices.

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