There was a cool article in the last issue of Discover, now online:

http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-06/features/energizer/

It's an interview of Amory Lovins, "physicist, economist, inventor, automobile designer, consultant to 18 heads of state, author of 29 books, and cofounder of Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank." Some quotes:

I used to work for Edwin Land, the father of Polaroid photography. Land said that invention was the sudden cessation of stupidity. He also said that people who seem to have had a new idea often have just stopped having an old idea. So I suppose if I bring something unusual to this business, it's that maybe I find it easier to stop having old ideas.

End-use/least-cost analysis begins with a simple question: What are you really trying to do? If you go to the hardware store looking for a drill, chances are what you really want is not a drill but a hole. And then there's a reason you want the hole. If you ask enough layers of "Why?"—as Taiichi Ohno, the inventor of the Toyota production system, told us—you typically get to the root of the problem.

Two-thirds of Saudi oil flows through one processing plant and two terminals that are in the crosshairs of terrorists. That stuff could go down any day for a long time. And that would presumably crash both the House of Saud and the Western economy. So for the bad guys it's a twofer. They would love to do that, and they've already had a couple of cracks at it. Now, this should make you uncomfortable. But we don't have to continue on our current path. We can go a different way.

A modern car, after 120 years of devoted engineering effort since Gottlieb Daimler built the first gasoline-powered vehicle, uses less than 1 percent of its fuel to move the driver. How does that happen?

Is it just me, or are all of the really smart folks (I mean sound-smart; good-sense-analytical smart) proposing solutions to the Big Problems that are essentially economic?