[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”] Boulder Daily Camera 30 April 2006 Hey, fellow Xcel ratepayers: weary after a long winter of double-digit rate increases? Watch out! Another rate increase to finance a polluting coal plant is hidden inside Xcel’s latest “rate adjustments.” These rate “adjustments” bundle a short-term rate decrease with a long-term rate increase. The long-term increase uses a “Construction Work in Progress” mechanism to finance a large coal plant in Pueblo. Most other states forbid or restrict CWIP financing. Xcel’s recent and impressive...

Corporate Environmental Strategy July 2001 In this article, the Lovins’2 explain what is meant by Natural Capitalism, four principles that enable business to behave responsibly towards both nature and people while increasing profits, inspiring their workforce and gaining competitive advantage. It combines radically increased resource productivity; closed-loop, zero-waste, nontoxic production; a business model that rewards both; and reinvestment in natural capital. The article describes how, even today, when nature and people are typically valued at zero, protecting and restoring nature, culture and community can be far more profitable than liquidating them.

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”] Also in The Aspen Institute’s 50th Anniversary Symposium “Globalization and Culture” The Impact of Globalization  Many people watched the recent protests against globalization in Prague, Melbourne, Washington, and Seattle, and wondered what all the fuss was about. Few would dispute that globalization has become a source of dissension, but fewer can describe the issues, and fewer still know what to do about them. Once an academic topic for policy analysts, globalization is now inciting demonstrations on a scale unseen since the...

By L. Hunter Lovins and Amory B. Lovins Also in Green@Work May/June 2000. [download .pdf of full article, PART I] [download .pdf of full article, PART II] PART I: Twenty-three years ago, claims that energy efficiency would shift United States energy use patterns, reducing overall consumption far below official forecasts, were laughed at. Today, total U.S. energy use is below the level suggested in the “soft energy path” (see figure). In all but five of the intervening years the amount of energy consumed per dollar of GDP fell—a total drop of more than 35 percent since 1973. Renewable energy sources, delayed by...

Also in Conservation Biology, Volume 16 #2, 2000. H. L. Menchen said that for every problem there is an answer that is short, simple, and wrong.  David Orr is one of the few thinkers who seeks to understand the broad-reaching interconnections among problems, and their relationships to biological diversity, conservation issues, and the creation of a decent and healthy world. Such a vision across boundaries enables him to see root causes and to offer answers based on whole-system understanding. He is correct that our current vulnerability–economic, ecological, food, security–is not so much a result of too little military, as it is...

By L. Hunter Lovins & Amory Lovins Also in The World and I [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][download .pdf of full article] Pioneering companies in sectors ranging from wire to plastic films and planned residential communities have already demonstrated that today’s environmental challenges hold many profit-enhancing opportunities. The late twentieth century witnessed two great intellectual shifts: the fall of communism, with the apparent triumph of market economics; and the emergence, in a rapidly growing number of businesses, of the end of the war against the earth,...

By L Hunter Lovins & Amory Lovins This article served as a basis for the U.S. negotiating position at Kyoto … [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][download .pdf of full article] ABSTRACT: Arguments that protecting the earth’s climate will cost a lot rest on theoretical economic assumptions flatly contradicted by business experience. Most climate/economics models assume that almost all energy-efficiency investments cost-effective at present prices have already been made. Actually, huge opportunities to save money by saving energy exist, but are being blocked by dozens of specific obstacles...

By L. Hunter Lovins & Michael Kinsley [download .pdf of full article] Residents of many growing towns and cities are learning the hard way that growth is not the solution to their economic woes. While they enjoy the benefits of growth, they also are vexed by the problems it causes: traffic congestion, crime, long commutes, air pollution, increasing intolerance, disrespect for traditional leadership, and increasingly cutthroat competition in local business. Rapid growth often causes higher rents, housing shortages, spiraling costs, and  demands for higher wages to meet the higher cost of living. Communities tolerate these side effects in hopes  of...