T. Boone Pickens

My husband retired from Phillips Petroleum Company in 1985 and after all the problems they had with T. Boone Pickens, I never thought I would ever have any praise for the man. But we were surfing on TV on Wednesday afternoon, and we came upon the town hall meeting he held in Topeka. There he explained his plan to get the country out from under our 700 Billion dollar annual expenditure for foreign oil. He proposed that we do whatever is necessary to end our dependence on foreign oil, whether it’s wind energy, natural gas, atomic energy, coal, or even offshore drilling..

He explained that we use 25% of the world’s oil and are only 4% of the world’s population. He suggests immediately developing wind energy and natural gas, both of which we have an abundance right here in America. He has a plan and it is a very good plan. It can be found at Pickensplan.com on the internet. Using his plan we could eliminate our addiction to foreign oil almost immediately. He suggests all new government vehicles , state and federal, be powered by natural gas. General Motors already has the technology to produce natural gas driven autos and trucks and in fact, already produces them for sale in South America.

This foreign oil addiction threatens our economy, our environment and our national security. All our enemies would need to do to bring the country to it's knees would be to convince our suppliers to cut us out of oil. They could do this by coercion or by force. It wouldn’t matter how. What matters is that it would work. That makes it imperative that we develop our own sources of alternative energy.

In 1970, we imported 24% of our oil. Now it’s almost 70% and growing. We send 700 Billion dollars out of the country every year and that’s four times the cost of the Iraq war.

The world’s oil production peaked in 2005 and oil production has fallen over the last three years. The simple truth, as Pickens says, is that the cheap and easy oil is gone. We need to develop new sources of energy at home and we need to do it immediately.

The Department of Energy says that 20% of America’s electricity can come from the wind. In one year, a 3-megawatt wind turbine produces as much energy as 12,000 barrels of imported oil. Plus, such expansion of wind power would create jobs.

I challenge every reader to read his plan and support the plan he has developed to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. The costs incurred in doing this are insignificant compared to the 700 Billion dollars we send out of the country each year to purchase foreign oil.