50 years ago today, an analysis in the journal Foreign Affairs mapped out a “soft” energy path that would have drastically reduced energy demand, shifted economies off fossil and nuclear energy, handed households and communities more control over their energy future—and concluded in 2025, if it had been allowed to run its course.

In Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, physicist Amory Lovins, who went on to lead the Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute, laid out two possible energy futures in a paper that focused primarily on the United States, but influenced energy futures analysis across much of the world.

“The first path resembles present federal policy and is essentially an extrapolation of the recent past. It relies on rapid expansion of centralized high technologies to increase supplies of energy, especially in the form of electricity,” Lovins wrote.

“The second path combines a prompt and serious commitment to efficient use of energy, rapid development of renewable energy sources matched in scale and in energy quality to end-use needs, and special transitional fossil-fuel technologies.”

The second, “soft” path “diverges radically from incremental past practices to pursue long-term goals,” and “the two paths are mutually exclusive,” he warned. “Because commitments to the first may foreclose the second, we must soon choose one or the other.”

Lovins added: “The first path is convincingly familiar, but the economic and sociopolitical problems lying ahead loom large, and eventually, perhaps, insuperable. The second path, though it represents a shift in direction, offers many social, economic, and geopolitical advantages, including virtual elimination of nuclear proliferation from the world.”

Use Less Energy, Use It Better

Lovins published The Road Not Taken at a moment when the U.S. was on track for a massive increase in conventional energy supply: vastly more offshore oil and strip mining for coal, 100 new uranium mines, 180 new 800-megawatt coal plants, more than 140 gigawatt-scale nuclear plants, all between 1976 and 1985 and with more to follow. Veteran energy modellers have since pointed out how the demand for that energy never materialized.

But had it happened, “the commitment to a long-term coal economy many times the scale of today’s [would have made] the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration early in the next century virtually unavoidable, with the prospect then or soon thereafter of substantial and perhaps irreversible changes in global climate,” Lovins wrote in 1976. “Only the exact date of such changes is in question.”

The Road Not Taken put much of the solution in “technical fixes” like insulation, heat pumps, efficient furnaces and car engines, less overheating and overventilation in buildings, and waste heat recovery that could improve energy efficiency in an advanced economy by a factor of three or four. “If that is correct,” Lovins said, “we could have steadily increasing economic activity with approximately constant primary energy use for the next few decades, thus stretching our present energy supplies rather than having to add massively to them”—at far less cost than building new capacity.

And just as climate hawks now argue that energy decarbonization is practical, affordable, and starting to scale, Lovins said the gains he’d identified were available right away, with major cost and energy savings available by the end of the 20th century. “The barriers to far more efficient use of energy are not technical, nor in any fundamental sense economic,” he wrote. “The answer—apart from poor information and ideological antipathy and rigidity—is a wide array of institutional barriers,” too many of which would be far too familiar to anyone trying to speed up today’s decarbonization agenda.

And meanwhile, this happened.

‘Like Cutting Butter with a Chainsaw’

The Foreign Affairs article laid out a “soft” energy path, consisting of technologies that were “not vague, mushy, speculative, or ephemeral, but rather flexible, resilient, sustainable, and benign.” Some of Lovins’ greatest hits—like vertical-axis wind turbines and fluidized-bed coal burning—have been overtaken by time and competing technologies, and today’s goal is to maximize electrification with affordable solar and wind, not to minimize it. But the paper laid out five broader criteria that defined “soft” energy technologies:

• They rely on renewable energy flows that are always there whether we use them or not, such as sun and wind and vegetation: on energy income, not on depletable energy capital;

• They are diverse, so that energy supply is an aggregate of many individually modest contributions, each designed for maximum effectiveness in particular circumstances;

 •They are flexible and relatively low-technology—not unsophisticated, but easy to understand and use without esoteric skills, accessible rather than arcane;

• They are matched in scale and in geographic distribution to end-use needs, taking advantage of the free distribution of most natural energy flows;

• They are matched in energy quality to end-use needs.

“People do not want electricity or oil, nor such economic abstractions as ‘residential services’, but rather comfortable rooms, light, vehicular motion, food, tables, and other real things,” Lovins explained. “Plainly, we are using premium fuels and electricity for many tasks for which their high energy quality is superfluous, wasteful, and expensive, and a hard path would make this inelegant practice even more common. Where we want only to create temperature differences of tens of degrees, we should meet the need with sources whose potential is tens or hundreds of degrees, not with a flame temperature of thousands or a nuclear temperature of millions—like cutting butter with a chainsaw.”

Read Amory Lovins’ full paper from October 1, 1976 here. Sign-in is required, but the link is available free.