Environment Forum

from Tales from the Trail:

Former political enemies join hands to save the world?

Nearly six years ago,  Senator John Kerry and Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens were mortal political enemies.

As a major backer of President George W. Bush's re-election effort in 2004, Pickens contributed millions to a right-wing ad campaign questioning Kerry's record as a Vietnam war hero. The ads, which Kerry disputed, put him on the defensive and may have contributed to the Democrat's failure to win the White House.

On Wednesday, the billionaire and the Massachusetts senator sat side-by-side in the Capitol's ornate Senate Foreign Relations Committee room, where Kerry presides as its chairman.

Their mission: To spread the word about the legislation Kerry and Senator Joseph Lieberman have written to tackle global warming by reducing U.S. consumption of dirty-burning fossil fuels blamed for climate change.

"If you look at life looking backwards and standing in one place, you're going to waste your time," Kerry told a small group of reporters when asked about the new relationship with the man he now calls "Boone." "Six years ago was six years ago," Kerry said.

Both Kerry and Pickens talked about the need to reduce America's reliance on foreign oil, which the Kerry-Lieberman bill aims to do. Pickens talked in patriotic tones about the need to make America energy independent within 10 years. "I don't care whether you use natural gas, ethanol, the battery.  You can use anything, just so it's American," said Pickens, who turns 82 this week.

Patriotism aside, Pickens stands to gain financially from the climate change bill that Kerry hopes to push through the Senate this year.

T. Boone Pickens: What, me worry?

Billionaire T. Boone Pickens is spending $2 billion on a bunch of windmills and so far has no way to get the electricity they will produce to market. Last December he said he was a touch anxious, but on Wednesday he didn’t seem worried at all.

Pickens is pretty sure President Barack Obama will get some new power lines built to those plains in the Texas panhandle, but if need be, the oil-man-turned-renewable-energy-advocate will take his toys elsewhere.

“I’m not going to end up with 687 turbines in my garage. They are going to be sticking up spinning someplace,” he said at a San Francisco stop on his latest tour to drum up support for his plan to use wind power and natural gas-fueled vehicles to wean the Unites States from imported oil.

Pickens expects the price of a barrel of oil to hit $75 by the end of the year as OPEC cuts production, and between that and the desire for energy independence he sees Obama finding a way to get transmission lines built from Texas to markets that need electricity – like California.

One person at the event asked him if he could end up being the “czar” of transmission, production, and more. “Yeah, I’d love it,” the old independent “wildcat” oilman said.

But Pickens is not planning to build transmission lines himself, in part because of financing. “If you’re gonna be the czar of all those things you mentioned there, you’ve got to have a hell of a lot more money than Boone Pickens has got,” he said.

T. Boone Pickens working on solar

T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oil investor who is building the largest wind farm in the United States, is also setting his sights on solar power.

Pickens last month launched a campaign aimed at weaning the United States off its dependence on foreign oil and is in the midst of a nation-wide tour to promote it. Following a speech in Los Angeles, Pickens told me he is looking beyond his wind investments to solar energy and is eager to share his “Pickens Plan” with both of the U.S. presidential candidates. Here’s what he had to say:

Q: Do you think your plan to meet with  Obama and McCain will happen any time soon?

A: Don’t know. It could. We’ll see.

 Q: Are you investing in technologies other than wind?

A: I’m interested in solar, but I’m not near as far along. But I have a bunch of engineers that are with me working on solar.

Q: Are there any emerging technologies other than wind and solar that interest you?

Gore vs. Pickens: who’s got the right plan?

When Al Gore challenged the U.S. to produce all of its electricity from renewable sources in 10 years, his aggressive plan to combat climate change was pitted against another recently-unveiled proposal, from Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

 Gore, a former Democratic vice president and Nobel Prize-winning crusader on climate change, announced his plan last week and has since promoted it on U.S. television. Expected to cost between $1.5 trillion and $3 trillion,  Gore advocates investment in wind, solar and geothermal energy, energy efficiency and a national power grid. He also wants to retain energy production from nuclear and hydroelectric power plants, and invest in technology to store and capture carbon dioxide from coal and gas.

Inevitably, though, Gore’s plan has been compared to the so-called “Pickens Plan,” which calls for a massive switch to natural gas as a transportation fuel and a dramatic increase in wind power (Pickens, a legendary oil man, is currently spending $10 billion to build the world’s biggest wind farm — a project he expects will be a big moneymaker). Pickens says his $300 billion plan will reduce the amount of imported oil by more than a third in the next decade.

 With a media campaign funded by Pickens’ vast personal fortune, the “Pickens Plan” has its own commercials running on TV. Gore’s plan is backed by his “We Campaign,” a $300 million effort launched earlier this year to mobilize Americans on climate change.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” this weekend, Gore said he disagrees with Pickens that natural gas should be the dominant transportation fuel, advocating for electric cars instead.  Pickens, however, has said Gore’s plan doesn’t do enough address the nation’s dependence on oil imports.

So who’s right? It’s clear that there is much that the men agree on, and both plans stand in stark opposition to President Bush’s recent move to increase domestic oil production by lifting the ban on oil drilling along most U.S. coastal states. 

But with a new president on the way who is expected to be kinder to the kinds of plans Gore and Pickens are proposing, which man do you think has the right plan for increasing renewables in the United States and reducing our oil consumption?