11:01 AM CST on Monday, March 28, 2005

By SCOTT BURNS / The Dallas Morning News

Nearly 30 years ago, Amory Lovins took on the utility industry.

The industry was predicting a high-energy future filled with nuclear power plants. Mr. Lovins called the forecasts "the hard path" because they committed us to producing ever more energy. Writing in Foreign Affairs, he suggested an alternative, "Soft Energy Paths."

He pointed out that the least expensive, safest and most secure energy we could acquire wouldn't come from more drilling and more nuclear power plants. It would come from using energy more efficiently.

Rather than the hard work of raising the bridge, he suggested the easier work of lowering the water. All we had to do was to make cars, trucks, houses and buildings more energy efficient. That, he wrote, would eliminate the need to build more nuclear power plants and to search for new sources of hydrocarbons.

Amory Lovins – ridiculed as a dreamer at the time – was right. The conventional wisdom was wrong. Energy efficiency in the next decade reduced our oil consumption so fast it broke the pricing power of OPEC and crushed oil prices.

Now working with a team from his Rocky Mountain Institute and with the support of the Department of Defense, he has a bolder idea – apply energy efficiency to end our dependence on oil.

Not just foreign oil. All oil.

In the process, we can revolutionize (and save) our auto industry, create a million jobs, strengthen our economy, end the flow of oil money that funds terrorism and win enduring national security.

In Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs and Security " (Rocky Mountain Institute, Snowmass, Colo., $35), Mr. Lovins shows us the path to reduce our oil consumption.

How much? How fast? Think about this timetable:

•Cut consumption by the amount we import from the Persian Gulf by 2015.

•Use less oil by 2025 than we used in 1970.

•Import no oil at all by 2040.

•Use no oil at all by 2050.

More impressive, much of this can be done simply by getting back on the efficiency improvement path we were on when we responded to the first and second OPEC oil price shocks in 1973 and 1979.

An idle dream, you say?

Not hardly. The book is supported with a "Technical Annex," a collection of studies and spreadsheets that totals a massive 15 megabytes, much of it in compressed Zip format, and all available as a free download. This is no pipe dream.

The centerpiece of Mr. Lovins' plan is a transformation of the largest oil consumer – transportation.

As you might expect, he starts with the American automobile. The plan calls for a transition to lightweight but safer carbon fiber-based vehicles that start as near-80 mpg hybrids (like the Toyota Prius) but evolve into fuel-cell vehicles.

If you are thinking to yourself, "Oh great, we'll all be riding around in three-wheeled Dinky Toys," relax. A pragmatist, Mr. Lovins' designs for future automobiles call for reduced weight but not reduced acceleration or safety.

More important, this is a market-oriented plan. Both political parties can back it, if they can sheathe their knives and ideology for a few moments.

While that is happening, we can replace 20 percent of current oil use with a domestic biofuels industry that would triple farm income and end the need for agricultural subsidies. (Brazil, he points out, has already done this.)

Similarly, we can save about half of our natural gas consumption by becoming more efficient consumers of electricity.

The stunner is how little this transformation would cost – a $180 billion investment over 10 years that would also create a million jobs. That $180 billion is less than investors lost in the collapse of WorldCom Inc. It is less than we will have spent on the war in Iraq in 2004-2005.

Measured another way, it's what the U.S. government pays in interest on its $7.776 trillion debt in about seven months. It's what an interest rate increase of 100 basis points (1 percentage point) would cost in only 28 months.

Why do I mention interest rates? The longer we import oil and borrow billions from other nations, the greater the odds we'll be paying through the nose for both imported oil and borrowed money.

It's time to change the game plan.

Coming Tuesday: The Road Not Taken, Part 2: Dump the Tax Code

Scott Burns answers questions of general interest in his Thursday columns. Write Scott Burns, The Dallas Morning News, P.O. Box 655237, Dallas, Texas 75265, or send an e-mail.

E-mail sburns@dallasnews.com