The Beautiful Wind of T. Boone Pickens

…A bad bet on oil prices caused the 80-year-old tycoon to lose about $2 billion last year, and investors fled his hedge fund. His wife, Madeleine, had to rethink her plans to rescue thousands of wild horses from slaughter; she’s now asking for federal funds. And Pickens’s prize initiative — a huge investment in wind power — has been scaled back by 75 percent.

Now, Pickens is relying on the kindness of strangers. “I need you, all of you: Help me on this,” the billionaire told the participants in the EnergyBiz magazine conference yesterday. Before leaving, he repeated: “Join with me on this. I need you. I seriously need you.”


What he needs, specifically, is for the government to back a national energy grid and an expansion of natural gas vehicles — policies that would dramatically increase the value of Pickens’s holdings in wind, water and gas. That obvious self-interest, and Pickens’s role in conservative causes such as the Swift boat veterans’ assault on John Kerry, has made would-be allies on the political left suspicious of his motives.

But while there are quibbles over the particulars, parts of the Pickens Plan are — or should be — uncontroversial: a new transmission grid to move renewable power, better energy efficiency, and using natural gas as a “bridge” fuel to power trucks and fleet vehicles until alternatives become more plentiful.

With Pickens, the controversy rests more in the salesman than in the product. Pickens didn’t mention global warming in his 45-minute talk at the Mayflower yesterday. In fact, he dismissed the “greenies,” as in: “You don’t want to turn it over to the greenies, or what’ll happen is they’ll want to shut down every coal plant . . . for power generation and our utility bills will go through the ceiling.”

Washington Post