In the early 1990s, the resource economist Harry Saunders started asking hard questions about energy efficiency programs. Climate change at that time had only recently come to wide public attention. But already, dramatic improvements in energy efficiency figured centrally in most estimations of what to do about the problem. Two factors conjoined to push this view. One was that energy efficiency represented a seemingly costless path to lower emissions, a way for politicians to reduce emissions without imposing high energy costs on their constituents. The other was that energy efficiency already figured prominently in the environmental agenda; in the late 1970s, green energy guru Amory Lovins had bundled radical efficiency improvements together with wind and solar energy technologies in what he dubbed the "soft energy path," the alternative to both fossil and nuclear energy.
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