Pickens Plan

T. Boone Pickens, the legendary Texas oil-man, is pushing a plan to hugely expand wind-energy in America ("the Saudi Arabia of wind power"):

America is blessed with the world's greatest wind power corridor and abundant reserves of clean natural gas. The Pickens Plan will utilize these tremendous resources to build a bridge to the future — a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives and buying time for us to develop even greater new technologies.

The Plan calls for building new wind generation facilities that will produce 20% of our nation's electricity and allow us to use natural gas as a transportation fuel. The combination of these domestic energies can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports. And we can do it all in 10 years.

Wind energy is at a cusp to take off as a major energy source globally. I do have some misgivings about Pickens trying to use Federal Government machinery to push wind power. OTOH, all the fossil-fuel companies already use that machinery to their benefit. In an ideal world there will be no favoritism played by any government, but given the world that we live in, I have no choice but to support PickensPlan.