T. Boone Pickens pushes his energy plan to packed house at UT-Dallas

by Jake Kemp

RICHARDSON — Oil-baron-turned-clean-energy-proponent T. Boone Pickens held a town hall meeting at the University of Texas-Dallas Thursday to discuss his plan to wean America off of foreign oil and become energy independent. The 500-seat auditorium the event was held in was packed; so much so that the speech was simulcast in another building to an additional 350 people interested in hearing Pickens outline his plan.

In the town hall meeting format, Pickens thrives. He is affable, and when speaking extemporaneously comes off as a wise grandfather-figure who has seen it all and has an answer for everything. At one point in his speech he even said as much: “When it comes to this stuff (energy policy), I have an answer for everything, and they’re good answers, because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these things.”

Last year, in the midst of the presidential campaign, Pickens launched a multi-million dollar campaign to get his plan into the public consciousness and the national debate. He shared an anecdote of waking up in the middle of the night one night last year, and deciding that focusing on clean energy was his new calling. “I think this mission is mine, and I have the money to tell the story,” he said.

To date, Pickens said he has spent $62 million dollars of his own money to get the word out about his energy plan. He has lost a huge sum of his fortune in the last year due to a tumultuous market, and Pickens says he is asked all the time if he would have still pursued this grandiose, costly plan if he knew he would soon be losing so much money. In a moment of somewhat surprising candor, Pickens said he tells people no, he wouldn’t have launched the plan. “But I believe things happen for a reason at the right time,” he said.

Currently, America imports more than 65% of its oil (according to Pickens' site). That’s up from just 24% in 1970. Last year alone, the U.S. spent $475 billion on foreign oil. Projected for the next 10 years, the bill will be $10 billion – the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind. Pickens says that this has implications in three distinct areas: our environment, our economy, and our national security.

While Pickens did say that all three of these areas are important for America to remain a prosperous, viable nation, he spent the majority of his time talking about the security risks that doing business with “unstable or unfriendly nations” poses to America. “My main issue is security for this country. You’re importing oil from your enemies,” he said. He listed Venezuela as a “scary and unstable” nation that we shouldn’t be doing business with. Pickens then turned his attention to the Middle East.

“Saudi Arabia, they are not necessarily an enemy, no. But they pay ransom to al-Qaeda to get off of them. They pay them off,” he said. “You’re paying for both sides of the war.” It should be noted that this claim about the Saudis “paying ransom to al-Qaeda” has never been reported in the mainstream news media.

He also said that America’s sheer oil consumption, regardless of where it comes from, could turn into a problem in the future. Currently, the U.S. consumes 25% of the oil produced every day, while comprising only 4% of the world’s population. “Other countries could eventually turn on us because we use so much,” Pickens said.

So how does Pickens plan to move America away from feeding at the foreign oil trough? The thrust of his vision is to harness the vibrant wind corridor and plentiful natural gas resources the U.S. possesses. Wind-generated electricity would incrementally take over the nation’s power grid. Pickens’ website says that wind could produce as much as 20% of America’s needed electricity in just 10 years. The site calls America the “Saudi Arabia of wind power.”

The second part of the plan involves replacing conventional gasoline with natural gas to power vehicles. Pickens says that first and foremost he is “going after the big cars.” According to Pickens, if we started by having only the 18-wheelers in this country run on natural gas, which is extremely abundant in North America, “we could cut what we get from OPEC countries in half in seven years.”

Pickens did not spend much time on the specifics on his plan. While the nuts and bolts of the plan can be found on his website, pickensplan.com, on Thursday he played the role of politician and salesman. Lines like, “the people in Washington, they don’t fully understand, they don’t recognize the magnitude of the problems we’re facing,” or, “this has nothing to do with politics, or Democrats or Republicans, it’s us – Americans together – that will solve this problem,” further emphasized his politician's stance.

His opponents cry that Pickens is only setting out on this path to further line his billionaire pockets. They point to the fact that he has invested heavily in companies that develop wind farms. Pickens laughs at that notion. “I’ve made enough money. I’m doing this because I want my grandkids, and their kids, to have the same standard of living in this country that I’ve had.”

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