Amory Lovins is a physicist specializing in environmentally safe and sustainable energy sources. Born in 1947 in Washington, D.C., Lovins attended Harvard and Oxford universities. He has had a distinguished career as an educator and scientist. After resigning his academic post at Oxford in 1971, Lovins became the British representative of Friends of the Earth.He has been Regents' Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and has served as a consultant to the United Nations and other international and environmental organizations. Lovins is a leading critic of hard energy paths and an outspoken proponent of soft alternatives.

According to Lovins, an energy path is "hard" if the route from source to use is complex and circuitous requires extensive, expensive, and highly complex technological means and centralized power to produce, transmit, and...