Amory Lovins, the sophisticated thinker who cofounded the Rocky Mountain Institute and easily one of my green heroes, came to Cambridge last week, and I am bereft! It's the second time this year — the other was MIT's energy conference in March — that important topical events took place in Cambridge without my knowing it.

Oh, the affrontery! Don't they know who I think I am?

So instead of hearing him speak, and perhaps meeting and/or interviewing him, I am left to read the transcript at xconomy.com or check the report filed by Martin LaMonica, who writes about green tech for CNet. He not only better informed than I, but he's very reliably informative.

Because I've read portions of Lovins's message in the past — it's how I know he's a hero — I was most interested in what he had to say about the automakers' bailout, which appears to be all but done. From LaMonica's report:

The biggest danger to cash-strapped U.S. auto companies is making incremental changes to their product lines, he argued. Instead, they need to make radically more efficient cars by adopting several technologies aimed at efficiency. (Lovins coined the term "negawatts," which refers to watts that are not used.)
"Right now they view accelerated transformation as a risk and a distraction. I think it's actually a low-risk strategy. When your competitors new and old all around the world are coming up with radically more efficient, safe, (and) durable cars, you can't afford incrementalism," Lovins said in an interview after his talk.
"It would be tragic to bail out the industry now and see it go under in another five years as competitors' faster innovation takes hold," he said.

I've written before that this economic crisis has reinforced for me how little I know about economics, and one of the murkier intersections for me has been the auto industry. They have been making bad decisions for decades, fighting progress rather than leading it, and there ought to be a payoff for that, just as there is for good decision-making. But with such a huge portion of the economy dependent on auto-making, it seems the only way to make the automakers experience the results of their short-sightedness is to make us all experience it.

Lovins's comment go right to heart of that. The money has to be tied to new directions based on what we're all going to need in the future, not just given to save the jobs for another few weeks or months.

Meanwhile, the bailout plan reported this morning includes provision for an "auto czar," what the Times calls "essentially a one-man board of directors." It compares the prospect to when the government told automakers what kind of tanks to build in WWII. They raise the word "nationalization."

Well, gee, when you put it like that, it doesn't sound so attractive. Am I for government ownership of industry? No. Am I for letting the current leaders in Detroit keep on keepin' on? No. Would giving them $15 billion make them suddenly wiser? Can't imagine it.

There is a solution here, right?

I saw this at Boing Boing. Their source was buffalobeast.com.