The past few months have been
exceptionally busy for Amory and his
staff .
Alex Markevich joined RMI in
October. As Vice President of the
Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS),
he’ll oversee this six- to nine-person
team, foster external partnerships, and
strengthen integration between OCS
and the rest of the Institute. His keen
strategic insight is already making its
mark. Alex comes to RMI with 13
years of strategic consulting experience,
most recently on Bain & Company’s
management team in London and
Moscow, and previously at Cannon
Associates and LEK Consulting.
His three years at Hewlett-Packard
included technical and marketing
work, emphasizing computer systems
performance. He holds a Ph.D. in
physics from Stanford.
Three OCS staff are completing an
intensive half-year update to our bestselling
1999 business book Natural
Capitalism. Aaron Westgate, Maria
Stamas, and Noah Buhayar have been
revising the text, reassembling worthy
overflow material, and updating old
and adding new case-studies. All will
be published later this year as optional
hypertext at www.natcap.org, which
also contains, by permission, the
original book edition and our Harvard
Business Review overview of it, “A
Roadmap for Natural Capitalism”—one
of HBR’s most reprinted articles. A
long-awaited French edition is also in
press at Editions Scali in Paris.
Over the past year, RMI’s original
(1982– ) headquarters building has
undergone extensive renovations and
improvements to physical fabric,
superwindows (now R-14, or in one
case R-19—insulating like 19 sheets
of glass), lighting, daylighting, wiring,
and other systems. The new interior
jungle, designed pro bono by EDAW
landscape architects Greg Hurst and
David Sachs and by our staff’s project
manager Aaron Westgate (who largely
installed it), saw inch-a-day banana-tree
growth last summer; the trees should go
bananas (and papayas, guavas, mangoes,
etc.) this summer. In April, the OCS
team moved back into its muchimproved
workspace.
In late 2007, Amory Lovins did a 38-
day round-the-world trip, supported
in stages by Alex Markevich, Michael
Brylawski, and Lionel Bony. In New
York, Amory received the Popular
Mechanics Breakthrough Leadership
Award and addressed a J.P. Morgan
utility conference. He and Judy then
flew to Tokyo to receive the Blue Planet
Prize (www.af-info.or.jp/eng/honor/
honor-e.html), where, in the presence
of Prince and Princess Akishino and
many other dignitaries, he invited Japan
to lead the global energy transition.
He also lectured at Tokyo University,
Ministry of Environment, Foreign
Correspondents’ Club, and National
Institute for Environmental Studies,
which has shown how to cut Japan’s
2050 carbon emissions by 70 percent
below the 1990 level despite robust
economic growth.
In Delhi, Amory addressed a leading
global business-strategy conference
keynoted by the Prime Minister, then
continued to Mumbai for Mahindra
& Mahindra and the Indian Institute
of Technology. Our hosts were excited
by his two national industry seminars
on superefficient ultralight cars and by
integrative design for radical energy
efficiency.
Next, in Gothenburg and Stockholm,
Amory addressed the Volvo group,
Chalmers Institute of Technology, U.S.
Embassy, and Royal Swedish Academy
of Engineering Sciences, which later
elected him a Foreign Member. He
received the Volvo Environment
Prize from HRH Prince Carl Philip
(see www.environment-prize.com/
pressRelease.e) as the fifth person in
the world to win both of these top
environmental awards, and the fi rst to
win both in the same year. Volvo later
made a special 60-second spot on our
work (see www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid41.
php), carried 60 times on the Volvo sponsored
global telecast of the Nobel
Prize ceremonies.
Via London for meetings with
senior business leaders, Amory fl ew
on to Boston to co-lead a charrette
for the Kendall and Barr Foundations
on accelerating Cambridge’s electric
efficiency, then a San Antonio fi nancialindustry
keynote, then home. But the
next month saw trips to Atlanta for
another utility finance conference,
Michigan (to receive the Goff Smith
Prize, U. Mich.’s top external award
in engineering), Syracuse U., Perth in
Western Australia (helping redesign
two radically efficient mines with
Rio Tinto), Big Sur, and Florida.
There his keynote (www.rmi.org/
sitepages/pid444.php) to the Institute
for Healthcare Improvement about
analogies between health and energy,
and a side-seminar on designing
superefficient healthcare facilities,
sparked breakthrough thinking on
which we’ll report later.
Busy though 2007 was, 2008 looks
even busier, but differently so. In a
two-week period in early 2008, Amory
helped redesign an oil refinery, a data
center, a famous big building, and an
auto company; each project should
strongly steer its industry toward
advanced resource efficiency. The
carbon saved by his work enormously
exceeds the amount emitted by his
travel, but Amory is thrilled that a more
thoughtful strategy led by Alex and
Judy will help him travel less, and more
virtually—moving only the electrons
while leaving the heavy nuclei at home
at the passive-solar banana farm.
