Lovin's Spoonfuls

"Natural Capitalism" Pooh-Bah Amory Lovins Goes to Sweden and Collects a Large Plaque or Something from Volvo

Amory Lovins—copiously mustached environmental guru and longtime apologist for the grasping claws of Big Money—left his mountain redoubt in Colorado late last week to journey to balmy Sweden, not to partake in something so completely unsustainable as the Nobel Prizes (ugh...high explosives), but to accept the largess of Volvo. Mind you, we love our sweetly thrumming old 240s as much as the next impoverished band of underachievers, but we're thinking Volvo has mainlined some serious gobbledygook with this here hunk of hardware, known since its inception in 1998 as the Volvo Environment Prize.

Here's the drill:

"The Volvo Environment Prize was formally instituted in May 1988 by the Volvo Annual Shareholders Meeting,with the objective of promoting research and development across the environmental spectrum, by acknowledging people who have made an outstanding contribution to understanding or protecting the environment through scientific, socio-economic or technological innovation or discovery of global or regional importance."

Lovins and his ultra-earnest Gor-Tex-clad brain trust up at the Rocky Mountain Institute have become players in the advanced-mobility game mainly because they've been pushing systems-oriented design solutions to our car-culture pickle. RMI actually spun off a lightweight composites manufacturer a few years ago, as a result of work its had done on a Hypercar concept vehicle. The Hypercar was allegedly tested at the conceptual level at RMI before the results were open-sourced for every major carmaker to bury in some dank R&D lab.

According to an RMI release: "Earlier in the summer, Lovins won the Asahi Foundation's Blue Planet Prize. By winning the Volvo Prize he becomes the fifth person to receive both awards and the first person to receive both awards in the same year."

Which is making us wonder, Just how competitive is this future-of-transportation racket if the same dozen or so guys pass around all the awards—and one, assumes, the prize money?