Reading the Pickens manifesto

Amidst great fanfare and hoopla, the much-touted Plan to wean America away from foreign oil by dotting the landscape with thousands of wind turbines was finally formally unveiled last Tuesday in Sweetwater, Texas.

 The Pickens Plan, as the audacious move has come to be known, could have been easily dismissed as a pie-in-the sky final wishes of an 80-year-old senile man in his twilight years were it not for the fact that the speaker during the roll out is T. Boone Pickens, the legendary Texan synonymous with oil, corporate raider, philanthropist, greenmail artist and shareholder-activist par excellence.

 The logic of his manifesto—the whole plan is succinctly written a la Marx-- is compelling.

 "We're paying $700 billion a year for foreign oil,” he declares. The whole strategy is to displace completely the 22% share of electricity production from natural gas with wind farms.

 And what to do with the home-produced natural gas?

 It should be pumped into the fuel tanks of the millions of vehicles crisscrossing the interstate highways and metropolitan areas of America. He is convinced that natural gas is the cleanest and most viable option to replace the hydrocarbon-based fuels used in most vehicles.

 He laments that of the approximately 7 million vehicles now using compressed natural gas (CNG) only 150,000 are in America’s roads. He traces the low conversion mainly to the distribution problems (e.g., lack of refilling stations and storage) and cost which his Plan also takes into consideration.

 And to silence detractors of his intentions, he is putting his own money where his mouth is: some $2 billion to put up the world's largest wind farm in nearby Pampa, Texas through Mesa Petroleum, a major energy company he owns—and that is just a start.

 Previous to the formal launching, some critics have obliquely pointed out that the Plan would only line up the coffers of his energy hedge funds.

 But he does not need the money. After all, he is already 80, ranked No. 117 among America’s richest by Forbes magazine and has some $4 billion in his pocket.

 He wants to enlist the whole American population--and to make sure that his movement will not be tainted with politics, he steers clear from political colors. He wants the energy question to be the No. 1 issue in the current presidential campaign, and is prepared to tangle with Democrat hopeful Barack Obama and Republican stalwart John McCain.

It is too early to pronounce a verdict whether the Plan is viable in the long term or not, but the road map is clear. And America is taking notice.

 In the few hours since the Plan was publicly launched, some 300,000 have signed up to come aboard Pickens’ gravy train.

 And why should we take notice of the Pickens Plan?

 It is because our energy situation is far worse. We are completely held hostage by foreign oil and our own energy plan, if we could call it that way, is a mishmash of ill-defined targets and much wishful thinking.

 For example, expecting that moneyed foreign investors would put up energy projects given the growing power demand without clearing up the bottlenecks in setting up major businesses in the country and without stabilizing the political and economic uncertainty is certainly expecting too much.

 Pickens laments that the energy issues have not been addressed by both the Republicans and Democrats whenever any of them is in power. He should be invited here to speak to our leadership and to our lawmakers who would rather bask in the glory of media talking about unsubstantiated allegations of roads to nowhere or overpricing of housing deals; and when not pointing accusing fingers at each other, are busy castigating foreign investors.

 Our esteemed senators could not even pass a rudimentary renewable energy law.

 We need a home-grown T. Boone Pickens to shake up our lethargic bureaucracy to address the current and the more dangerous looming energy crisis before it is too late.