Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Snowmass-based Rocky Mountain Institute, has won the Blue Planet prize, one of the world’s top environmental awards.
The prize’s sponsor, Japan’s Asahi Glass Foundation, said Lovins was selected “for his contributions to leading global energy strategy for protection of the global environment by efficient utilization of energy.”
Lovins co-founded the Rocky Mountain Institute in 1982 and has become widely acclaimed in business and environmental circles for developing economic approaches to energy efficiency and conservation.
“Amory Lovins has been inspiring environmental activists and planetary thinkers for over 30 years,” said Steve Smith, a Wilderness Society official in Glenwood Springs. “His calculations for improving the efficiency of the ways we use energy provide the vision and, more important, the practical, economical, everyday ways to implement that vision, so that we don’t have to beat up our natural places in a panic search for new fuel supplies.”
Asahi gives the prize each year to two individuals. The other winner is Joseph Sax, an environmental-law scholar in California. Lovins and Sax each will receive an award of $407,000.
Another Coloradan, Susan Solomon, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Boulder, won the Blue Planet prize in 2004.
Staff writer Steve Raabe can be reached at 303-954-1948 or sraabe@denverpost.com.
