Pickens in the Wind

T. Boone Pickens: The man with the plan (Courtesy of www.pickensplan.com)

During SXSW '06, the producers of the documentary Oil Crash were discussing how they got so many major figures in the petroleum industry to talk very openly about the inevitability of falling supplies and rising prices. Simple, they explained: Just wait for them to retire. Once they were out of the industry, they were much more willing to talk. Unfortunately, they weren't in a position to do anything about it.

That's why there's a few eyebrows raised that near-legendary oil man T. Boone Pickens isn't just saying oil dependence is bad, but doing something more than just shrugging his shoulders and saying "I'm an old man, what am I supposed to do about it?"

Pickens has started buying TV time to promote his Pickens' Plan, an effort to put real governmental and industry effort into creating a real green-collar jobs by shifting from oil to natural gas and renewables. Which is a huge improvement over all the money he threw into anti-John Kerry 527 smear groups in 2006.

Of course, Pickens is heavily invested in wind power and gas-powered transportation: So is he just trying to make more cash from renewables? The jury is out. But when a man synonymous with oil looks into the camera and says "This is one emergency we can't drill our way out of," that carries some weight.

The mechanics of the plan are actually pretty interesting: Boost wind and solar, freeing up more natural gas as a transportation fuel. Rather than change the sources of oil, he argues to just use less. Nuclear (which somehow, just because it is low-C02 and low-NOX emission, has become green all of a sudden) will become a bigger part of the mix eventually, but that will require time and better plans for what to do with the waste.

Pickens makes one major economic point: That the US will spend $7 trillion of its increasingly worthless currency overseas over the next ten years on a product it will burn. Has anyone else noticed that the crude oil and gas it imports comes from countries with stronger currencies than the US dollar, which in no small part is caused by (take a guess) US dependence on imported goods like oil.