Oil Tycoon Turns Green Crusader

"This is one emergency we can't drill our way out of."

So says legendary oil man T. Boone Pickens, about the current energy costs that are well on their way to turn into this generation's energy crisis.



With the emerging economies in China and India, oil is just going to keep getting more expensive and more scarce. Drilling is not the answer. It is time to start in earnest the shift to alternative energy sources.

We import 70 percent of our oil at the cost of over 700 billion a year. In 1970 the number was only 20 percent. This percentage is increasing every year. As Pickens says, "Projected over the next 10 years the cost will be $10 trillion — it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind."

There is no silver bullet to fix our energy woes, but Picken's Plan is a nice piece of hardware to start building an arsenal to do it. His plan is to build windmills to generate electricity, and to shift the natural gas they replace to power cars.

Natural gas is our second most plentiful homegrown energy resource. Wind is the most plentiful alternative energy source in Picken's home state of Texas. Experts say that the US could generate as much as 20 percent of our electricity with wind power in less than 10 years. Plus, as the manufacture of hybrid and electric cars starts to ramp up, that wind power means cleaner energy and less foreign oil on the highways of America.

Pickens then proposes to start converting cars to natural gas power. Every car that is converted to homegrown natural gas means a drop in the amount oil we need to import. Natural gas is much cheaper and cleaner than gasoline, and the conversion costs much less than a hybrid or electric conversion.

T. Boone Pickens has heard the call, and has put his money where his mouth is. TV ads are not cheap. Sure, he stands to make a lot of money with the windmills he is financing, but that is not the point. It is time for private industry and the government to get together and solve this crisis and break our addiction to foreign oil.

Look folks, this is one of those clarion calls that we all must answer. As if gas prices, global climate change, and war in the Middle East is not enough, how about the future viability of the American way of life.

Take a look at Picken's Plan: www.pickensplan.com