The main new results in this paper are contained in the geometric Theorems 1 and~2 of Section~0.1 below and they are related to previous results of M.~Gromov and of myself (\cf\ \cite{1},~\cite{2}). These results are used to prove some general potential theoretic estimates on Lie groups (\cf\ Section~0.3) that are related to my previous work in the area (\cf\ \cite{3},~\cite{4}) and to some deep recent work of G.~Alexopoulos (\cf\ \cite{5},~\cite{21}).

Let $\Delta$ be a left invariant sub-Laplacian on a Lie group $G$ and let $\nabla$ be the associated gradient. In this paper we investigate the boundness of the Riesz transform $\nabla\Delta^{-1/2}$ on Lie groups $G$ which are amenable and with exponential volume growth and on certain homogenous spaces.