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The soft energy path is an energy use and development strategy delineated and promoted by some energy experts and activists, such as Amory Lovins and Tom Bender. Energy conservation is its cardinal premise.
As physicist/consultant/lobbyist Amory Lovins describes it, the "hard energy path" (with which the soft path contrasts) involves inefficient liquid-fuel automotive transport, as well as giant, centralized electricity-generating facilities, often burning fossil fuels (e.g., coal or petroleum) or harnessing a nuclear fission reaction. (See radioactive waste.) The hard path is not simply a matter of energy sources, though, because it is greatly augmented and complicated by wastage and loss of electricity and other common, directly usable forms of energy.
The "soft energy path" wholly preferred by its advocates involves efficient use of energy, diversity of energy production methods (matched in scale and quality to end uses), and special reliance on "soft technologies" (a.k.a., alternative technology) such as solar energy, wind energy, biofuels, geothermal energy, etc.
A criticism levelled at decentralized energy production approaches is that, generally, the large, centralized methods produce energy much more efficiently than small, distributed plants. However, this is a generalization, new developments are in the works, and even today there are sometimes exceptions (see the discussion in the renewable energy article). In Lovins' analysis, large-scale electricity production facilities have an important place, but it is a place that they were already filling by the mid-1970s. At that time, Lovins felt that more centralized, large-scale "conventional" energy production facilities would not generally be needed.
Lovins argued that besides environmental benefits, global political stresses might be reduced by Western nations committing to the soft energy path.
Facts have validated some of Lovins' assertions. While U.S. federal commitments in the energy field have varied and no ongoing, official resolve to adhere to the soft energy path has been made at the national level, in the Winter 1998 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, Amory Lovins pointed out that choices made by industry and citizens had resulted in national energy use just slightly lower than the projection he had made for the soft energy path in 1976.
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