The T Boone Travesty

I don't know about you but I am fed up to here already with the T Boone Pickens' TV ads on his "solution" to the oil situation. Let's review a few basic facts from one of my earlier blogs. Except for emergency purposes the US does not produce electricity with petroleum. This point cannot be made strongly enough. T Boone is playing on the ignorance of the general public by implying that converting 20% of our national electric grid to wind will "solve" the oil issue. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I have said before absent putting sails or solar panels on cars and trucks neither wind nor solar will lessen our dependence on oil for transportation.

His end game proposal is to use this 20% of wind driven electricity to replace the 20% of natural gas now being used to fire power plants producing base load and peaking electricity. Putting aside for the moment the real issue of the non-reliability of wind as a 24/7 source of electricity, one has to ask why is T Boone pushing this "solution." This is his dirty little secret. T Boone is not only invested in wind farm technology but the real payoff for him is to use the natural gas now being used for electricity production for transportation. And guess who is heavily invested in the natural gas industry. Why Mr. T Boone his very own self. Long story short T Boone's plan is not about American energy independence. It is about making T Boone even richer than he already is.

So much for the good ole' country boy, I'm only in this for the good of the country theme of his infomercials. He is being disingenuous with the American public and they need to know it.

Now I am in favor of wind and solar energy and believe that they should be use where ever and when ever economically possible, and I am in favor of tax credits and limited government subsidies to encourage R&D in these technologies. The truth of the matter is that we cannot and should not rely on these for our energy future. We also need to develop nuclear, clean coal and all our potential oil resources including the off-shore, ANWAR and oil shale properties as rapidly as possible.

As I have said in an earlier blog, the real solution to American oil independence is a full speed ahead NRA type program to develop clean (i.e sequestered CO2) coal technology and fast tracking the building of more nuclear plants so that we can convert to an all electric powered ground transportation system by 2050. Like T Boone likes to say about his program it is our problem to solve and we can do it!