Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have shut down congress for the summer without voting on drilling for oil freeing Ms. Pelosi for her book tour. We would like our government to step in and solve the problem for us but it is not going to happen. Our elected leaders do not have a strong track record of solving our problems. They usually arrive too late and make a speech while having their pictures taken with the private citizens who did the work.
While no one plan will solve our energy and environmental problems, T. Boone Pickens has put forward a suggestion for a start. In fact, he has done more than that; he has opened his wallet to put the plan into action gambling his wealth in an effort to fix things himself.
Pickens is spending his money in the Texas panhandle building the largest wind farm in the world. He wants to see those turbines stretch northward to North Dakota through a corridor that has the most favorable winds on the planet. Building these turbines would cost private investors one trillion dollars and building the means of moving that power to where it is needed would cost another two hundred million.
The Department of Energy estimates that it is possible to convert twenty percent of electrical power generation to wind sources. Many believe that with recent innovations, that number is much higher. Pickens proposes that we use the wind energy to replace power generated by burning natural gas.
Natural gas burns thirty percent cleaner than gasoline. A natural gas burning Honda Civic is currently rated the cleanest production vehicle in the world. Natural gas is also significantly less expensive than gasoline. In some parts of the country it is as cheap as a dollar a gallon. In Albany, New York, it currently retails for $1.98 while gasoline is $3.98.
We can scarcely afford to keep spending $700,000,000.00 a year on foreign oil. With ninety-eight percent of our natural gas coming from domestic sources and our wind harvested locally, if we could change half of our automotive fleet over to natural gas, we could save $350,000,000.00 a year while cutting greenhouse emissions by fifteen percent.
You can learn all of the details of the plan by going to www.pickensplan.com, watching the videos and reading the articles.
