Read the Pickens Plan

If you haven’t seen the new television ads being run by longtime oilman T. Boone Pickens, I encourage you to take 60 seconds to check it out.

In a single brief ad, Pickens lays out an intelligent and easy to understand plan to break America’s dependence on oil. You can read the whole plan here (and I encourage you to do so – it’s an easy read), but here it is in a nutshell:

1. Establish wind power as a mainstream source and producer of a substantial fraction of America’s electricity

2. Leverage these new wind resources to free American natural gas (currently used to generate 22% of our electricity) to rapidly phase out oil as our primary transportation fuel.

Pickens supports the eventual transition to renewable fuels for our vehicles but claims that the technology is not yet ready.

Here’s my two cents on the plan – I’ll keep it short and sweet:

We should embrace and expand wind power as rapidly as possible. It should be a national project on par with Eisenhower’s initiative to build our highways, the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program.

And while natural gas would be a better fuel for our cars than oil in pretty much every respect (read his plan – very compelling), I’m not convinced we couldn’t do better (see sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil).

However, my summary opinion is that this plan represents a dramatic improvement over the status quo.

Thoughts, anyone?