Don T. Boone is not just tilting at windmills

For several weeks now I have seen TV commercials featuring Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens in which he is touting some kind of bold, new energy initiative involving wind power, natural gas and biofuel.

Today I finally took a look at the plan and must say I am impressed, but then, it doesn’t take much to impress me. The wind part is the most imaginative portion, to me at least. Pickens believes we can build a corridor of wind farms from Texas to North Dakota that could generate 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. The cost would be a mere $1 trillion plus another $200 billion to construct the capacity for transmission from the wind farms to the cities.

“That’s a lot of money,” says Pickens on his Web site, “but it’s a one-time cost. And compared to the $700 billion we spend on foreign oil every year, it’s a bargain.”

You aren’t just whistling “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” that’s a lot of money.

The T. Boone, as I shall refer to him henceforth, also points to the use of natural gas as the automobile fuel of choice due to its more than adequate abundance in the U.S. and its ability to power up autos with some 23-30 percent less greenhouse gas than diesel and gasoline respectively.

I have to say that certain aspects of The T. Boone’s plan do sound enticing and certainly interesting. Like many others these days, I think that it is going to take some sort of dramatic, “Man to the Moon” kind of plan to free us from our expensive and dangerous foreign oil jones.
But also after seeing the Pickens Plan I sort of get a feeling like “Is this all there is?”


Since I think the phrase: “the devil’s in the details” is extremely trite, I shall ljust say for now about the initiative that the fight is in the dog or perhaps, the West Nile is in the ‘skeeter. Check out The T. Boone’s plan and see for your ownself.

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