Climate & Nature...

When T. Boone Pickens founded Mesa Petroleum in the 1950s, he took $2500 and turned it into a three billion dollar oil empire. This guy is about as old-school oil man as you can get. But Pickens is a business man above all else – and considering the state of the world’s oil, he’s planning accordingly. According to Pickens, “At current oil prices, we will send $700 billion dollars out of the country this year alone — that's four times the annual cost of the Iraq war. Projected over the next 10 years the cost will be $10 trillion — it will be the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.”

So what’s Pickens doing about it? This guy is going from Big Oil to Big Wind, investing in a tremendous wind turbine project, starting in the Texas Panhandle. In fact, he’s recently announced plans to expand into Oklahoma. This is all part of the Pickens Plan, an extensive blueprint to promote oil alternatives. The plan is to replace natural gas resources with wind energy, which would then free up to 38% more natural gas resources to replace the current need for transportation -- and therefore our dependece on oil. Yep, Pickens also owns an extensive natural gas monopoly -- but hey, it's clean energy. And people aren't being killed in the Middle East over. All sounds good in my book.

Pickens is promising more than just pulling back on our foreign oil dependence. His wind turbine investments are also turning around the local economies, transforming declining Midwestern Dustbowl towns into revitalized communities. Until recently, the small Texas town of Sweetwater was landsliding towards a depression. Now, with Pickens bringing in the wind industry, it is called “a 21st-century equivalent of the Wild West. German wind technicians who have poured into the area have coined a name for it - the Wind West.”

And for a Texas oil man who has been one of the biggest backers of both President Bushes and the mastermind of the Swift Boat incident of the last election – this ain’t bad politics.