Soft Energy Controversy

224 contingency/resilience Soft EnergY ControversY The informal (individual) and formal (collective) dialectic in BRC has reached a balance that allows both Rania Ghosn scales and forms of colonization to function, and through feedback, affect each other. While the soft framework In October 1976, Amory Lovins, a consultant physicist the engineering disciplines and demand as in the domain operates through organization, hierarchy, legibility, and cen- and British representative of Friends of the Earth, of the economics,” he states that a tendency to narrow the tralization, it also allows utmost flexibility for self-generated published the article “Soft Energy Paths: The Road Not energy debate into the exclusive domain of economics and occupation. As stated by Garrett, “Our city is dynamic, Taken.” Lovins’ paper outlined an alternative “soft path” engineering ignores other and perhaps more important adaptive and reactive.”23 to conventional energy policy,1 announcing that sustain- perspectives.4 In contrast to energy modelers who view While Black Rock City provides clues on how a soft ing energy growth was not the answer. The hard path energy decisions as governed by the number of kilowatt organizational framework (‘road’ layouts, planning guidelines, technologies—high-energy nuclear and centralized electric hours delivered per dollar invested, Lovins views energy and occupational zoning) can be deployed to create resil- energy—resulted in excessive waste of resources, which choices as fundamentally social, political, and institu- ience, its collective is essentially generated before the event. could not continue given rising costs, adverse environ- tional in nature. The curated interests that bond its residents is not the case mental impacts, safety concerns, and the proliferation of In the gestalt of the early 1970s, Lovins proposes to in the contemporary metropolis, but the notion of how soft weapons. A significant social change, Lovins reasoned, dissociate energy consumption and economic develop- fields and frameworks are conceived and organized in these was necessary to transition from the hard to soft energy ment, which typically centered on growth and cost. In his two projects, provide a template for infrastructural deployment path. The goal was to shift industrial societies to lower- view, the energy problem was closely tied to the society that accounts for and reacts to disturbance. energy, fission-free, and decentralized sources that would that used it, and in particular to the underlying assump- match energy supply and quality to user demands. tion that “the more energy we use the better off we are.”5 Resilient Ecologies The “Soft Energy Paths” article brought a storm of Indeed, environmental historians have elaborated how Feedback, non-linearity, scalar indifference, resilience—– controversy that culminated with a congressional hearing the carbon regime was propelled by the belief that energy these characteristics, adopted from natural ecosystems are of Lovins and his critics in December 1976.2 Beyond its consumption is an essential facet of social progress, or critical to understanding how to reconcile the dialectics of historical significance in contemporary policy circles, the development tout cours.6 By equating the rate of energy pluralism if applied to the human ecology. This understand- debate on the hard and soft paths has had an important consumption with progress, development indicators have ing aligns itself with Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies,24 legacy in the discourse on renewables and social change. contributed to the exponential increase in oil sales. Lovins wherein Guattari merges the human and environmental This essay traces some of the contributions and limita- instead shifts the discussion towards an examination of sphere into the concept of “ecosophy.” Guattari’s three eco- tions of Lovins’ argument to frame a critical discourse the different energy uses. If the hard path rests on the logical registers—–environment, social relations, and human on energy. On one hand, it acknowledges the significance belief that the more energy we use, the better off we are; subjectivities—–could be re-characterized as the natural world of Lovins’ position in highlighting how our energy in the soft path, how much energy we use is considered and human political world (comprised of both the collective choices are socially and politically grounded, particularly a measure our failure. Wilhelm Ostwald, a chemist and or ‘social relations’ and individual or ‘human subjectivities’). when bringing their costs, benefits and risks into public Nobel-prize laureate, had already preached as early as 1900 The collective platform, if we recall Giacometti’s City discussion. On the other hand, it questions the appropri- that the stature of a civilization should not be measured Square, could thus be reframed as the external environment ateness of the hard-soft binary which abstracts the social by its level of coal consumption but by the quality of its (the natural ecology) and the socio-political environment (the relations it proposes to anchor itself in, and what alterna- exploitation of energy. The soft path espouses end-use ori- human ecology). The figures embody the distinct individuality tive worlds it promises to deliver. entation to determine how the volume and kind of energy of our subjectivities. The spatial format that reconciles such needed for a given task, and then supplying the required symbiosis is infrastructure as it oscillates between the natural The Soft as a Critique of the Fossil Fuel kind of energy. and artificial and requires collective support yet enables Energy System Along with a critique of growth, the convergence of individual actions. Constantly negotiating between the socio- In the words of Dr. Pickering, one of Lovins’ critics and a the environmental movement and the energy crisis sug- political (both individual and collective) and environmental professor of social ethics, Lovins deserves “our critical atten- gested an alternative worldview that took into account the spheres, soft infrastructures can operate as ecologies that tion because he is trying to generate a sense of alternatives, finite nature of the world’s resources and of its geographic are highly resilient. and because he does pose, however backhandedly, the space to critique the historically cheap price of energy. Fabricating resilience—–to allow and adapt to distur- problems of social change which are necessarily entailed “‘Cheap’ energy,” Lovins argued, “is actually very expensive; bance—–is perhaps the only way to gain agency in a metropolis in any serious discussion of the future of our energy needs we pay for it by structural distortions everywhere else in that is increasingly divergent, crisis-ridden, contradictory, or the future of democratic institutions.”3 On a basic level, the economy.”7 In the United States, the “tacit identifica- and formed by the complex negotiation of politics, econom- Lovins proposes to expand the narrow disciplinary framing tion of the rate of growth of primary energy use with the ics, culture and the environment, amongst other factors. of Energy, and by extension the grounds from which to level of well-being,” has lead to the subsidization of energy Disturbance from natural and human factors is increasingly engage choice. In his response to a memorandum from supply.8 Myriad direct and indirect public subsidies have not the exception but the norm. By seeking symbiosis and the Energy Research and Development Administration, kept the price of oil artificially cheap and not indicative of feedback between these divergent spheres, we can reframe which framed “energy supply as primarily the domain of its full economic cost to society. In particular, the historic the city as an eco-political project that finds holistic unity while allowing for distinct localism. 1. Amory Lovins, “Soft Energy Paths: The (San Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1979). Fuels,” Environmental Review 11.3 (1987): Road Not Taken,” Foreign Affairs 55 (1976), 3. Hugh Nash, ed. The Energy Controversy: 167-188. 65-96. Soft Path Questions & Answers (San 7. Hugh Nash, ed. The Energy Controversy: 2. U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Small Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1979), 237. Soft Path Questions & Answers (San Business and Committee on Interior and 4. Ibid., 36. Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1979), 60. 23. Ibid. Insular Affairs, Alternative Long-Range Energy 5. Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Towards 8. Amory Lovins, “Soft Energy Technologies,” 24. Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies Strategies (Washington D.C.: GPO, 1977). A a Durable Peace (Cambridge: Friends of the in Annual Review of Energy (1978): 477- (London and New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone selection of Lovins’ critics and his responses Earth, 1977), 4. 517, 477. Press, 2000), 28. are published in Hugh Nash, ed. The Energy 6. Martin Melosi, “Energy and Environment Controversy: Soft Path Questions & Answers in the United States: The Era of Fossil Bhatia Resilient Infrastructures INFRASTRUCTURES RESILIENT Goes Soft bracket 227 and federal budgeting in domestic and foreign policies. He and argue that such artifact was just one among many overlooks that discussions of energy are ineluctably part of interrelated elements within a geographically extended the larger constructions of geopolitics, and as such need to system for the supply and transport of electricity.21 It engage with the deconstruction of particular geographies is not only the fixity, the durability, and the enormous

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