His first novel, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” is one of the first works tobe published under the Creative Commons license — anagreement that lets people copy and redistribute the book freely so long as theycredit the author. That move puts Doctorow at the forefront of a growingdigital rights movement.

Doctorow’s novel is like a love letter to Napster, Google and Walt DisneyWorld. It’s a rollicking, fast-paced story and is entertainingly inventivewithout bogging down in the impressive array of future technologies it imagines.”Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” (also published in hardcover this month by TorBooks) is set in a future where death has been eliminated, energy and rawmaterials are freely available in limitless quantities (much like MP3 files onKaZaA today) and people’s nervous systems are wired directly into the Internet.The protagonist, Julius, works at Disney World, and the novel chronicles hisstruggles to protect the theme park’s Haunted Mansion from being shut down by anad hoc group of designers who have developed a technology for “flash baking”theme-park experiences directly into parkgoers’ brains.

In his day job, Doctorow is outreach coordinator for the Electronic FrontierFoundation (EFF). He’s also one of the primary contributors to thepopular techie weblog BoingBoing, he co-founded a dot-com,
OpenCola, and he has another science-fiction novel and a short-story collection due out later this year.

Like his character Julius, Doctorow is an archetypal geek, from his nerdy DrewCarey-style glasses to the bright yellow cell phone dangling from his cargopants. I caught up with the prolific (and apparently highly caffeinated) Torontonative in his office at the EFF, where a blueprint of the Haunted Mansion hangs overhis desk.

This will make me sound like I’m behind the times, but this is actually thefirst time I’ve read an entire novel on screen.

It would make me pretty happy if this book contributed in some wayto the idea that reading books on the screen is good. I know that there’s a memethat floats around that says, oh, reading off a screen is hard, and no one wantsto do it and so on — despite all the evidence to the contrary. Most of thepeople I know read off a screen for 12 hours a day.

I won’t deny that there’s a sentimental frisson of good feeling you get when youpick up a physical, paper book, especially one with your name on it. Books arenice, but they’re not as nice as we make out.

I think that, ultimately, the role of books in the world of electronic publishingwill be much like the role of live music in the world of recorded-musicpublishing. We’ll still have plenty of paper books, but that will be dwarfed by theenormous size of the electronic-book universe.

You’ve written several novels, you’re at work on two more, you work for theEFF and you’ve got a popular blog where you post 10 or more items a day. Wheredo you find the time?

Well, sleep is for the weak. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

The thing about it is that there is synergy. The stuff that I do for BoingBoingis basically research in support of EFF and the writing, and the blog is how Ikeep track of it. By doing it in public, I get lots of suggestions, and I also geta lot of feedback. BoingBoing is a net time saver because I get more researchdone with less effort, and I keep track of it better than I would if I were doingit privately.

The research that I do on EFF issues is also feeding the fiction. I published astory last August on Salon called “0wnz0red,” about digital rights managementand trusted computing. That came straight out of a briefing I got here.

In your book, you have a sort of alternate currency called Whuffie. Thecharacters are constantly checking one another’s Whuffie scores and looking forways to earn more Whuffie. Can you explain the idea?

Well, currency is a way of keeping score today. Whuffie is howmuch esteem people hold you in. Currency is a really rough approximation ofWhuffie. You can’t really get a job without esteem. You generally can’t get amortgage with no esteem.

In the book, I have this sort of magical McGuffin technology, which is somethingthat can automatically find out how you feel about everything that you have anopinion on. Then, someone who has a high opinion about me can ask me — withoutany kind of conscious intervention — how I feel about you. They can just ask thenetwork, “How is it that Cory feels about you?” And that gives them some idea ofhow much time of day they should give you.

It sounds a little like walking around with your bank balance displayed in abox above your head at all times.

Well, it’s true. Except, you know, we already do this, in some way. As currencyis a rough approximation of your Whuffie, the things that currency affords, likeyour style of dress, your haircut, all the semiotics of your presentation, aredescended from Whuffie. It’s just that Whuffie’s harder to [fake].

The Internet has made us very socially deviant, in the sense that social normsare enforced by groups. If you have some incredibly strange idea of, forinstance, wearing underwear on your head, generally speaking, there is socialdisapprobation that keeps that factor in check. But on the Internet, you canbasically exist in the communication spheres of people who have the same valuesystem as yours, no matter how weird it may be. On the Internet, you don’t getthat pressure to return to a norm. In some ways, Whuffie is a way to make youmore socially normative. It’s not necessarily a good thing.

Why did you call it “Whuffie”?

The word is what we used in high school instead of “brownie points.” A friendof mine pointed out, given the era that I went to high school in, that it almostcertainly came from “The Arsenio Hall Show”: “Woof, woof, woof.”

Most of the book takes place at Disney World, and the plot centers aroundvarious factions’ attempts to control the Haunted Mansion there. You seem alittle fascinated — almost obsessed — with Disney.

(points out a large collection of Disney paraphernalia in his office) Yeah,I’m a little obsessed. There’s so much to love and so much to hate about DisneyWorld and about the Disney corporation that it’s the perfect obsessive materialfor someone who wants to mine the cultural space.

I was raised by schoolteachers, and my grandparents were snowbirds. Every winterthey would fly south to Fort Lauderdale to a gate-guarded, seniors-only communitycalled Century Village that my dad likes to call “Cemetery Village.” We tookChristmas breaks in Lauderdale, and it was just about as dull as you can imaginefor an eight- or nine-year-old. So we would get in the big, gas-guzzling landyacht that my grandfather drove, and we would go to Disney World for a couple ofdays. Christmas weekends every year, during my whole adolescence, were spent atDisney World, and I just became completely obsessed with it.

Walt’s genius was that he would come up with incredibly novel, innovative thingsthat could only be imitated after a couple of years. Meanwhile, he wouldhave this very healthy margin until his competition figured out what he was doingand drove the price down to a competitive level. Then he would do the next thing.But when Walt died [in 1966], they just stopped doing that. They just starteddoing the same thing. They basically built a twin of Disneyland in Disney World,but bigger.

There’s lots you can say about [Disney chairman and CEO Michael] Eisner thatisn’t very flattering, but the one thing you can say is that under Eisner’sleadership, there has been a definite focus on innovation, at least in Florida. AtDisneyland, unfortunately, they brought in these idiot McKinsey consultants, theystopped spending any money on R&D and they bought all these off-the-shelf midwayrides, with Ferris wheels, for the California Adventure. They built thisincredibly dreary, boring, banal theme park that is like an extremely clean butless fun version of the Santa Monica pier, and, unsurprisingly, it’s a ghost town.You could fire a cannon down the main drag without hitting a tourist.

In the world of “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” there’s no death, there areunlimited resources, nanotechnology can create any object you desire (including aclone of yourself) and energy is free. What were you trying to accomplish bysetting the story in that kind of world?

I wanted to clarify my own thinking about what a non-scarce economics lookslike. Keynes and Marx and the great economic thinkers are all concerned with themanagement of resources that are scarce. If it’s valuable, it needs to bemanaged, because the supply of it will dwindle. You need to avert the tragedy ofthe commons [the notion that self-interested individuals, such as sheepherders,will always use as much of a common resource as possible, such as a grassypasture, until that resource is totally depleted].

Today, with things that can be represented digitally, we have the opposite. Inthe Napster universe, everyone who downloads a file makes a copy of it available.This isn’t a tragedy of the commons, this is a commons where the sheep s***grass — where the more you graze, the more commons you get. So I took the idea ofnanotechnology as the means whereby any good can be reproduced infinitely, atzero marginal cost, and tried to use that as a metaphor for the online world weactually live in.

The other side of it is this notion that you never really run out of scarcity.There are always limits on your time and attention, there are only so many people whocan fit in a restaurant, only so many people who can converse at once. When youare beset on all sides by entertainment, figuring out which bits are worthwhilerequires a level of attention that quickly burns all your idle cycles. Wheneveryone watched Jackie Gleason on Thursdays at 9:30, it was a lot easier– television watching required a lot less effort than whipping out your TiVo andfiguring out which shows you want to prerecord.

What’s your approach to writing?

It’s really quotidian. I write a page a day, basically. With novels, once Iget the first 20 or 25 percent on paper and an outline done, I usually make thatsemipublic. I have a list of about 200 or 300 first readers, and I e-mail them mypage, every day, even before I spell-check it, hot off the word processor. Theykeep me really honest. When I miss a day, they e-mail me and nudge me.

I had a really successful experience doing that with my second book, “EasternStandard Tribe” [due out in November 2003]. I wrote that between Aug. 1 andDec. 12 of 2001, 60,000 words in five months, and actually managed to sell itwithin a week of my finishing it.

You’ve lived in San Francisco a while now. How do you like it here?

I’ve lived here since September of 2000. Right at the height of the boom.

I really miss Toronto. San Francisco’s a really dysfunctional place. It has a lotof the downsides of living in a small town and a lot of the downsides of livingin a big city, and it misses a lot of the upsides of both of those places. It’svery hard to get from one place to another. The mass transit is so-so. Going fromthe Mission to downtown on foot feels about 10 times as long as it actually is.It’s a Jane Jacobs nightmare of freeway overpasses and single-use neighborhoods.

The weather’s OK, although it would be nice if the buildings were insulated,because when it’s 40 degrees at night and you don’t have insulation or centralheating, damn, it’s cold.

The thing about San Francisco that keeps me here is the people, the technology.This is ground zero for technologists. This is geek mecca, it’s nirvana. But Iheartily miss the Northeast. You can see the bones of a great city in SanFrancisco, and there are pockets of it that are like nothing else on Earth, buttaken as a whole, it’s really dysfunctional.

Also, I can’t get my head around the private-medicine thing. I think thisexplains a lot about the various geek cultures of the U.K., Canada and the U.S. Inthe U.S., there are tons of venture capital, so everyone went out and started acompany. In Canada, there are tons of socialized medicine, so everyone became afreelancer. If you’re a freelancer [in the U.S.], and you’re in poor health, andyou can’t get insured, you are embarking on a kind of slow suicide. And then, inthe U.K., they had tons of arts grants, so all the geeks became Net artists, andthat’s why there’s all this kind of strange, situationist, British Net art.

I’m told that Canada spends less money per capita giving away health care thanthe U.S. spends regulating it. So you’re spending more money keeping the HMOshonest than it would cost you to give it away. That’s a big difference betweenthe American and Canadian mind-sets.

How many downloads of your book have there been so far?

There have been 47,334 from my site. Ninety downloads since we started talking. I hope tobreak 50,000 today.

That’s just moving right along.

Hell, yeah!

Link: Q&A: Cory Doctorow

Link broken? Try the Wayback Machine.

This intriguing tale is revealed in “The Last Lone Inventor,” a newly published book byEvan I. Schwartz (HarperCollins, 322pp., $24.95). Schwartz, who also wrotethe early dot-com classic “Webonomics,” visited San Francisco recently totalk about Farnsworth, Sarnoff and the birth of television.

SF Gate: How did you come on the idea for this book?

Evan I. Schwartz: I was covering the Internet and how it was changing ourlives. I thought the only way to get perspective on all this new technologywas to go back in time and research other communications technologies whenthey were new, and how the public reacted to them. That’s when I startedreading about the story of Philo T. Farnsworth, the farm boy who inventedtelevision.

In the summer of 1998, I went on a little pilgrimage to Farnsworth’slaboratory on Green Street, where he invented television. I couldn’t believethat the building was still there. There’s a [video-production] company,Philo Television, there, and I went up and found all these Philo fans. He’dbecome this inspirational character to some people.

The story had great characters, there are lessons about technology we canlearn and there’s a great setting. I really just became captivated by it,and it wouldn’t let me go.

Your excitement about the topic and your engagement with thecharacters really shows through in the book.

Farnsworth was this ball of nervous energy, and he looked like aninventor, and of course the name Philo T. Farnsworth — I mean, I didn’tmake the name up. He had this gigantic forehead that looked like it had anoversized brain inside — and it probably did, considering the stuff he wasdoing. And then [RCA President] David Sarnoff, who was the world’s firstelectronic-media mogul, he is the villain in this story, but also verycomplex, because he invented this heroic path for himself, and he really lethis ego get the better of him. He got carried away sometimes.

Farnsworth was only 14 when he first conceived the idea fortelevision. How did he get from that moment of insight to his first workingprototype?

He was inspired by the great lone inventors like Edison, Bell,Morse and the Wright brothers. He was reading every science book he couldfind, and memorized Einstein’s photoelectric theory, which won the NobelPrize for physics in 1921. That was the same exact year that Farnsworth wasout plowing the potato fields, looking at the parallel lines in the field.That was his “Eureka!” moment, that the only way to transmit these imageswas to scan electrons [in parallel lines], use them to represent thechanging light patterns then transmit that signal through the air likeradio.

The first successful demonstration of television was in San Francisco onSept. 7, 1927, when he was 21 years old. He unveiled it to the press a yearlater, and the Chronicle broke the story. He had the press conference on aSaturday, and I guess no one else showed up. Public relations was not hisforte.

Sarnoff, sitting in his office in the Woolworth Building [in New York City]– which was the tallest building in the world at that time — when he readthe story, he started devising his plan to steal the idea, or at least delaytelevision, because otherwise it would topple his radio empire.

How did RCA respond once it heard Farnsworth had demonstratedtelevision in his San Francisco lab?

Sarnoff started secretly funding Vladimir Zworykin’s research atWestinghouse. Zworykin had a Ph.D. in physics from the St. PetersburgInstitute of Technology in Russia, and he also believed in the electronicapproach to television. But Zworykin was making very slow progress, so inApril 1930, Sarnoff sent Zworykin to the Green Street laboratory.

Well, Zworykin arrived in April 1930 for three days. Farnsworth and hisbackers showed him everything. They treated him very cordially, because theyhoped to license their patents to Westinghouse — they didn’t know that hewas working with Sarnoff. Zworykin held up Farnsworth’s image-dissectortube, which was the first electronic television camera, and said, “This is abeautiful instrument. I wish I had invented it myself.”

Then he went back to Pittsburgh, at Westinghouse, where he attempted tobuild a crude replica of Farnsworth’s image-dissector tube. He then took itdirectly to David Sarnoff, who put Zworykin to work at RCA Laboratories inNew Jersey — and the race was on to develop a commercially viabletelevision.

Farnsworth was really kind of an anachronism, wasn’t he? His modelsare these solitary inventors — but by the time he started, as your bookdocuments, the process of invention had already become very corporate.

He believed he was going to bring new inventions into the worldjust like his heroes. Of course, by then, companies had sprung up around thenew inventions, all these inventions led to great new industries and themanagers who ran these companies were afraid of the next invention thatwould disrupt or topple their empires. So they began launching these thingsthat were called corporate R&D labs, which didn’t exist in this countryuntil the year 1900, when GE launched GE Labs. By the late 1920s, all thetop 500 companies had their own R&D labs. So Farnsworth didn’t fully realizehe was fighting this new system of corporate-controlled innovation.

If you look at patent ownership from 1931 on, it’s dominated bycorporations, whereas before that point, it was dominated by individuals.

What was the effect on innovation and invention, of that shift fromthe independent inventor to the corporate R&D department?

Well, in terms of being an inventor, you had no other choice. Ifyou were working in a corporate R&D department, with your invention, youwould assign it to the company. In those days you got a check for onedollar. Once you signed the check, the contract was enforced, and thecompany owned the patent. And that’s where the best and the brightest peoplewent to go to work.

In a way, you can’t argue with the success. The corporate R&D labs led tothe whole electronics industry and to the computer industry. But meanwhile,lone inventors were marginalized. They were considered outcasts and nuts. Itjust became unheard-of that an individual was associated with a greatinvention after that, like Edison was with the phonograph or Bell with thetelephone.

The story, I think, is this transition from where society was at thebeginning of the century, which was an independent frontier culture largelydominated by American individualists, to the end of the century, which is atechnology-obsessed, media-controlled culture. Not that there’s anythingwrong with it; it’s a great place to live. I love it. But it wasn’t alwaysthis way, and it wasn’t all that long ago — it was only in the span of alifetime that this massive change happened.

So what does the invention of television tell us about what’shappening right now?

Well, people learned incredible lessons when the market crashed[in 1929]. RCA lost 90 percent of its value, and most stocks were just wipedout. It was worse than the crash we experienced, but the lessons weresimilar. People were more skeptical of corporations — especially involvingtechnology — were very cautious about investments. Yet subsequently,technology became more popular and more powerful than ever. The marketcrashed in 1929, but radio was more popular and more powerful than ever. Themarket crashed in 2000, but the Internet isn’t going to go away. It’s justgoing to become more powerful and change the world in ways that we don’teven know yet.

So, how did things end up in the battle between Farnsworth and Sarnoff?

Well, you’ll see what happens if you read the book. The story takes theseunexpected twists and turns.

Fair enough. At any rate, it sounds like Farnsworth never got therecognition he deserved.

That’s right. Interestingly, the only time Farnsworth was ontelevision, nationally, was on the program “I’ve Got a Secret,” in 1957. Hestumped the panel — they couldn’t guess who he was, and he won $80 in cashand a carton of Winstons. [A video of this episode is available onSchwartz's Web site.]

By then, of course, television was taking over the country. TV went from 0percent market share in 1948 to 90 percent in 1960. It’s very similar towhat the Web was going through in the ’90s. But Farnsworth was alienatedfrom his invention. At one point, you couldn’t mention the wordtelevision around him.

What was the most exciting point, for you, during the research andwriting of your book?

Interviewing people who were there. I first visited PemFarnsworth, the widow, in December 1999. She was 91 years old. It was reallyexciting meeting her. She’s a remarkable person, and she tells these vividstories. I couldn’t have written the book without her.

And also, just going on these trips, researching and going to these places,like the potato farm where he grew up. There are so many resources in theNational Archives and the Library of Congress, and just finding these olddocuments and memos — it was almost like a detective story.

The Farnsworth family is working for some kind of recognition ofFarnsworth’s role in inventing television, right?

They’re trying to get the television academy to give PemFarnsworth an Emmy — “an Emmy for Pemmy” — during the Emmy broadcast thisSeptember. That’s the 75th anniversary of the invention on Green Street. Andthat’s going to be the last major anniversary, because she’s 94. Farnsworthhas never gotten that kind of national recognition, so it would be awonderful moment in television if they could give her the award. [For moreon this campaign, visit www.philo75.com.]

Link: Q&A: Evan I. Schwartz / Author of “The Last Lone Inventor”

Link broken? Try the Wayback Machine.

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death among women in the UnitedStates. Last year, more than 182,800 women were diagnosed with breast cancer, and40,800 women died of the disease. Currently, breast cancer diagnosis requiresbiopsies, a procedure in which small tissue samples from suspicious lumps areremoved — many of which turn out to be benign.

A San Jose medical technology startup called BioLuminate is working with LawrenceLivermore National Laboratory to develop a new device, called the Smart Probe,that may eliminate the need to perform many of those painful biopsies. The SmartProbe is about the size of the needle used for drawing blood and contains asophisticated sensing system. Inserted into the breast, the Smart Probe useslaser light and electrical impedance measurements to determine whether it isinside normal breast tissue, a benign lump or a cancer.We spoke with John Marion, special studies leader in the medical technologyprogram at Lawrence Livermore, about the development of the Smart Probe, which isexpected to enter human trials this summer.

What’s the current procedure for detecting breast cancer?

A mammogram by a physician or palpable lumps found by the person herself are thetypical first signs.

Then, at some clinics, they do a fine needle aspiration, which is literallysticking a needle into the suspicious area, drawing out some blood andintercellular fluid, and then a pathologist looks at that. If it’s stillsuspicious, they would go to a core biopsy.

For core biopsies, they have this fairly complicated, horrific-seeming machinethat shoots the biopsy needle into the suspicious location and takes a sampleout. The needle is about 2 or 3 millimeters wide. The reason why they shoot it isbecause the breast is jiggly and you want to be able to get it to the spotwithout having the breast move. But they do from like 10 different spots to makesure they get the right location, so they make a lot of holes in this woman’sbreast. It’s not a nice thing. Then it goes to the lab for analysis, which takesa few days. If it’s still suspicious after a biopsy, then people generally arescheduled for lumpectomies or a mastectomy.

Would you rather die of breast cancer? Of course not. But we’re trying to make aprocedure that is comparable in accuracy to a biopsy but much less invasive andcan be done in real time. Those are the two keys.

Why is the Smart Probe project looking at breast cancer, as opposed to some otherform of cancer?

Breast cancer is kind of unique, because with a mammogram, when it says there’ssomething suspicious, it often ends up not being cancer. So you’ve got this hugegroup of women that are scared to death because they think they have cancer, butthey don’t actually have it.

The idea behind Smart Probe is this: Is there some kind of test you can do forthis class of women who have just had a suspicious mammogram? It needs to bequick, might even be done in a doctor’s office, and has to be quite reliable insaying, hmm, we’re still worried, let’s go on to the next set of tests. Or, ifyou look OK, let’s go on and just do another mammogram in a year.

So how does the Smart Probe actually know it’s been inserted into normal tissueor cancerous tissue?

Well, the Smart Probe is a needle, it’s sharp, and it’s hollow, and in thathollow area, there is a solid stainless steel wire in the center that’s used foran electrical impedance measurement. That’s been shown to be a pretty reliableway of differentiating between denser and regular tissue. Tumorous tissue tendsto be denser.

Then there are a couple of optical fibers. We’re shining lasers down one of thefibers and receiving inputs back up the other. The probe that we’re building forthese upcoming trials will have five different colors of light that go down thisone fiber.

What you find is that optical scattering is a function of wavelength and of thetissue. So, for example, if you shine a blue light down and you get a lot oflight back, it’s fat; if you shine green light down and you get a lot of lightback, it’s cancer.

The whole thing fits into a so-called 20 gauge needle, which is about amillimeter across.

You expect human trials to begin this summer at the University of California atDavis. How will those tests be conducted?

We’re starting with a set of tests on about 100 women that are scheduled to havea lumpectomy or a mastectomy. So after they have been anaesthetized, we’ll do theSmart Probe procedure. Then they’ll have that tissue excised. There’s apathologist who will look at the tissue and make a clinical diagnosis, and thatwill be used for the care of the patient. And then there will be a team ofpathologists that will do a more comprehensive report. It’s that combination ofthe comprehensive pathology report with the data that we get from the Smart Probethat will hopefully lead to a learning process.

What happens once the human trials are complete?

Well, of course what’s going to happen is we guessed wrong, and that set ofmeasurements that we’re so thrilled with right now won’t quite work. I would loveto be surprised. But I’m almost certain that it’s one of these things where thefirst set doesn’t work perfectly.

On the other hand, I would really be shocked if we didn’t get some great datathat showed we can really see some very distinctive differences between normal,benign and cancerous tissues.

Crystal balls are dangerous, but I think if things went very well, this could beon the market in two and a half to three years.

How is the Smart Probe project funded?

The way Livermore works with a company like BioLuminate is that they give usmoney and we do the work. They have to pay the whole bill, we actually can’t doit another way. The agreement with BioLuminate is $1.4 million over 18 months.

How does Lawrence Livermore benefit from the arrangement with BioLuminate?

Oh, well, that’s pretty easy. There are a lot of things that we want to dorelated to sensing degradation in aging weapons and being able to assess what’sgoing on inside a bomb without having to take it apart. So all thisminiaturization, fiber optics, new chemical sensors, new optical sensors, thoseinevitably will have feedback into the weapons program.

Do you think this will have application to other kinds of cancer?

Absolutely. For instance, questionable findings on the cervix are very, verycommon. And there’s a good screening test for that — the Pap smear. It would bevery nice if there could just be an optical probe that they set against thequestionable tissue and could characterize it as cancerous or not, without havingto poke it, or grab it, or grab a big chunk of it.

But like any small company, the last thing you want to do is start trying to cureall cancers. So the focus is on breast cancer at this point.

Will this be an expensive procedure for patients once it’s commerciallyavailable?

As far as cost, the goals are to have this be consistent with other early tests for breast cancer. You’ve not only got to have something that works as well, but it has to be of comparable cost.

In terms of the way the climate works right now, patient discomfort is fairly fardown the list of reasons to change to a new procedure. If it costs more or isless effective, but it’s better for the patient — [shrugs]. It has to cost about thesame, be just as effective, and then we can realize these other benefits.

Link: Q&A: John E. Marion II, Ph.D.

Link broken? Try the Wayback Machine.

Noted energy expert and former experimental physicist Amory B. Lovins founded theRocky Mountain Institute, an influential energy think tank based in Snowmass,Colo., in 1982. While still in his 20s, Lovins rose to prominenceduring the oil crisis of the 1970s as an articulate advocate for energyconservation. Since then, his work has focused on market-friendly approaches tousing resources more efficiently and solving environmental problems. A recipientof a MacArthur Fellowship, Lovins’ most recent book is “Natural Capitalism:Creating The Next Industrial Revolution” (1999). During a recent visit toCalifornia, Lovins met with Gov. Gray Davis and made numerous public speakingappearances in the span of two days. We caught up with him on Earth Day to askabout technology’s role in causing — and perhaps solving — the Californiaenergy crisis.

Lots of people blame the Internet and California’s many Web server farms for thecurrent energy crisis. Yet California ranks 48th in the United States forper-capita energy consumption. What’s going on here?

The Western Fuels Association has very effectively spread the new urban myth thatthe Internet is using 8 to 13 percent of U.S. electricity. The actual number ismore like 2 percent.

In fact, California’s per capita power consumption has been essentially flat for30 years. Of course you have had a good deal of population growth, so your demandhas grown, but it grew in the ’90s at an average rate of 1.3 percent a year –which was two-fifths less than the national average. A quarter of all thereduction in electric intensity in the United States has been coming fromCalifornia.

It is a myth that server farms or information technology are causing, or thatCalifornia is experiencing, soaring demand. Demand didn’t soar, demand crawled.

What technology or what industry actually is the biggest consumer of power?

The biggest user of electricity in California is pumping water over themountains. And therefore, water efficiency is a very good way to saveelectricity.

Don’t the big Web-hosting facilities such as Exodus consume a lot of power?

You will often read in the press that they use 100, 200, even 300 watts a squarefoot, which would mean that they look like an office but act kind of like a smallsmelter. They don’t actually use that much — the measured intensity is typicallyaround 30 to 60 watts per square foot. However, even that could be very muchlower.

In our own office last year, we replaced four Windows NT servers with a littleLinux box the size of a book, called a Rebel NetWinder. It peaks at about 15watts, and normally pokes along at a few watts. It’s faster, cheaper and morecapable than the four NT boxes put together. It doesn’t take up much space, andit uses 98 or 99 percent less electricity than the four boxes it replaces.

Are there other technologies that could help solve the energy crisis?

Practically everything we do that uses electricity can be done severalfold moreefficiently, at lower cost, with the same or better service quality. My4,000-square-foot household uses $5 a month worth of electricity, a 10th ofnormal. Although it’s up near Aspen, where it can go to minus 47 (degrees) onoccasion, I’ve harvested 27 banana crops inside with no furnace. Thesuper-windows and super-insulation cost less than the furnace would have cost toinstall. The super-windows use a technology called Heat Mirror, from SouthwallTechnologies in Palo Alto.

One of Rocky Mountain Institute’s tenets is that “small is profitable,” andyou’ve argued that a decentralized power grid is more reliable than a centralizedone. So, how long will it be before we all have power plants in our back yards?

Back yards, basements, rooftops and driveways. I think that’s coming on veryfast. Hypercar Inc.’s Web site describes a car that we’ve been developing: a 100mile-per-gallon, midsize sport utility vehicle that runs on hydrogen fuel cells.It could be in volume production in five years.

When you have a hydrogen fuel cell car, you can drive it to work, plug it intothe spare hydrogen producing capacity that’s in the nearby building, and pluginto the electric grid. And then while you sit at your desk, your car is now alittle power plant on wheels, sending back 20 or 30 or 40 kilowatts to theutility. That can earn you back a third to a half the cost of owning the car.

The Hypercar vehicle fleet, fully built out, will have five or 10 times thegenerating capacity of the current national grid. It doesn’t take many peopleliking this value proposition to put the coal and nuclear plants out of business.

It seems like Americans are hell-bent on buying the biggest, heaviest, leastfuel-efficient SUVs that they can find, and electric cars haven’t sold well. Doyou think there will really be a market for fuel-efficient vehicles?

It’s true the battery cars didn’t sell all that well, for pretty good reasons.But the hybrid cars like the Honda Insight I drive and the Toyota Prius areselling like hotcakes.

Let me give you some basic specs of Hypercar’s Revolution concept car. It handlesfive adults, up to 69 cubic feet of cargo, half a ton of capacity and it can haulthat up a 44 percent grade. It looks a bit like a Lexus RX-300. It can go fromzero to 60 in about 8.2 seconds. It’s very sporty. It’s so light and slippery itcan actually cruise at 55 miles an hour on the same energy that the Lexus usesjust for its air conditioner. The body doesn’t dent, rust or fatigue. It’s radarstealthy. It could be bullet resistant — you know, these are useful attributesin a modern urban environment.

What technologies can I buy, borrow or steal right now that will help me use lessenergy?

On the RMI web site, you’ll find a book called “Homemade Money:Saving Energy And Dollars In Your Home,” which willtell you what to do, in what order, if you own or rent a house or apartment.Basically, whenever you get lights or appliances, you should get the mostefficient ones.

The American Council For An Energy Efficient Economy puts out anannual guide to the most efficient appliances on the market.

Do I have to give up my gadgets, like my Palm Pilot, my cell phone and my TiVo?

No. They use essentially no electricity. Indeed, there is good evidence, whichyou’ll find on the Web at www.cool-companies.org, that e-commerce and theinformation revolution probably save more energy and more electricity than theyuse.

If you’re in an office building, you can turn up the thermostat 4 degrees in thesummer on hot afternoons. Chances are nobody would even notice, but you couldsave 20 or 30 percent of that peak energy load.

Or, here’s a really simple one: If you’re in an office with venetian blinds, tiltthem up so that the light is bounced up on the ceiling as God intended. Then thewhole room will be suffused with diffuse, soft light, and you’ll find that youwill see better if you actually turn off the lights.

Are you optimistic that people will actually learn to conserve and use energymore efficiently?

Oh yeah, I think people are pretty smart, and they have plenty of incentive touse energy in a way that saves money. Some of what we need to do in the shortterm is curtailment, which needn’t be painful, it’s usually just turning offthings you’re not using anyway. The off switch is the best way to cut your billthis summer.

Link: Q&A: Amory B. Lovins

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