ENERGY FORECASTING

Thus, if the de-industrializers succeed in going back to an 18^th century economy run on sunshine and windmills, they are absolutely right that energy consumption will drop; in fact, to the extent that the present recession is due to their wrecking tactics, their ridicule of the experts' unfulfilled predictions is really laughter at the thousands, in Detroit and elsewhere, who have lost their jobs. Truly hilarious!

In reality, what is proved doubly wrong is Lovins' claim that energy consumption can be drastically curtailed without economic hardships:

Contrary to fashionable wisdom, the energy consumed per GNP dollar produced is a ratio that has remained remarkably constant over the last 35 years. With small fluctuations, it has hovered around 88,000 BTU per 1958 dollar of GNP, as shown by the figures below:

As for Lovins' recent ridicule of the forecasters, it would be wrong to dismiss it as plain nonsense; for it is nonsense heavily compounded. It appears from a letter by Prof. Spinrad to Science (8/8/80, p.636) that Lovins has ridiculed forecasts ascribed to others, but invented by himself.

However, beyond proving Lovins wrong (a trivial achievement), the constant energy-consumption/GNP ratio shown in the figures overleaf does not get one very far, for there is no guarantee that this ratio will continue in the same stable fashion, and there is no known principle to exclude any change of the trend in the future.