The road we were told not to take

Happy 50th anniversary to “certainly one of the most important things we have published …”

Wendle Whiting, Guest Commentary

Happy 50th anniversary to “certainly one of the most important things we have published …”

The quote from David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, in November 1976, is from his introduction to an essay by a future Roaring Fork Valley resident. Brower noted that nobody had won the Peace Prize that fall and offered a theory: The Nobel people “had not yet seen what Amory Lovins has to say.”

The essay, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” was published in Foreign Affairs in October 1976 by a 28-year-old who went on to grow bananas in Old Snowmass and found the Rocky Mountain Institute, now RMI, with revenue over $170 million a year.

That was the party Friends of the Earth threw 50 years ago: an entire issue of its newspaper and talk of a Nobel. Nobody is throwing much of a party on the 50th anniversary of that Foreign Affairs issue, so I brought cake, a calculator and a request.

I wrote in this space in 2023 that Lovins was complicit in the climate crisis and I’d like to explain why. His essay told America to choose between a “hard path” of big power plants and a “soft path” of efficiency and renewables. The hard path was the government’s plan: “450 to 800 reactors” by 2000. He called for America to “phase out its nuclear power program" and predicted the “American example” would carry the decision abroad.

Then he gave the game away. Even if nuclear power were “clean, safe, economic, assured of ample fuel and socially benign,” he wrote, “it would still be unattractive.” He granted every argument for nuclear in advance and opposed it anyway. Prejudice in search of a reason.

The environmental movement, which spent the 1950s chanting “Atoms, not dams,” pivoted. Lovins says Jimmy Carter called the article “exceptionally important in framing his energy policy,” and within six months nuclear was officially a “last resort.” Almost no American reactor ordered after 1978 was ever finished. Brower promised America would “lead the world back from that [nuclear power] brink.” It did — straight up to the carbon one. Lovins has taken credit for the policy ever since and blamed nuclear’s collapse on the price tag, as if he had not spent 50 years pushing it off the cliff.

The math fits on a cocktail napkin. Keep all the efficiency and solar. Change one thing: From 1985, nuclear replaces coal, then oil, then gas, on France’s 15-year schedule to 75% nuclear. By 2000, the U.S. fleet reaches 435 reactors, inside the range Lovins mocked. What does that scenario buy?

Result, through 2024: 65 billion tons of CO2 never emitted in the U.S. Add the wavering countries he named (Japan, West Germany, Italy and nine others): 115 billion tons. As of this year, the planet’s remaining carbon budget for 1.5 degrees is 130 billion tons. The road Lovins told us to take put the equivalent of 89% of that into the sky.

RMI’s Basalt headquarters makes 114,000 kilowatt-hours of rooftop solar a year, sparing about 40 tons of CO2 (net-zero premium for the building: $1.34 million). At that pace, 115 billion tons takes 2.7 billion years. Or every building on Earth, all 2.75 billion, matching RMI’s best work (built in 2015, not 1976) for a year, spending a mere extra $3.7 quadrillion. To pay for one essay.

France ignored the American example, built 56 reactors in 15 years and now makes electricity at about 40 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, against a world average of 473.

When the Sierra Club board voted against nuclear in 1974, its two scientist members warned the policy “would mean more environmental damage from coal.” They lost 9 to 4. They were right. Germany started closing reactors in 2011: 26 million more tons of CO2 and 800 more air-pollution deaths a year.

Environmentalists repeated the experiment at the Indian Point nuclear power plant. Downstate New York went from 77% to 89% fossil power in a year; statewide power emissions rose by one-fifth.

Here is the twist. Anyone can read RMI’s website, and in June it quietly posted a new “perspective on nuclear energy.” The institute is now “technology-neutral,” and nuclear fission sits on its list of “clean firm” technologies worth continued innovation.

So, 50 years after the essay, the institute has moved. But its founder has not. In 2022, Lovins wrote that nuclear power is “simply too slow to make much difference to climate.” Too slow, huh? Gee, if only we hadn’t stopped 50 years ago.

When a nuclear plant is uneconomic, he still calls it “ripe for abandonment,” as he did the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. To Lovins, a price tag outweighs a planet and the people on it, unless the price tag is on his own headquarters. That only makes sense if your finance committee is chaired by Shell’s former CFO, as RMI’s is. The climate has paid the price for a prejudice that hardened into hubris.

Which brings me to the request: an apology. Not to me. To the earth. Lovins is 78, brilliant, and still the environmental movement’s most trusted energy voice. People who march against transmission lines, sue to close reactors and call themselves climate activists may not listen to the likes of me. They would listen to him.

Imagine Lovins marking this anniversary with one honest paragraph: that the hard path he warned us off is the only one that ever decarbonized a grid in 15 years, and that an environmentalist who opposes nuclear power in 2026 is not an environmentalist.

The essay made his name. That paragraph would redeem it, and it would be the most important thing he ever wrote.

Wendle Whiting can be contacted via email at 435reactors@wendlewhiting.org.