Mother Earth News just published a long excerpt from environmental writer Amanda Little’s Power Trip. Here’s an excerpt of the excerpt. The rest can be seen here.
War Without Guns
My venture into America’s energy future began with a trip to a flat, dry and mostly barren town in the gusty prairies of west Texas that had become one of the leading frontiers of America’s clean energy development. The very same region of the country that offered up a seemingly limitless supply of oil in the days of Spindletop had been selected as the site for the world’s largest wind farm. In June 2007, billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens announced a $10 billion bet to build a 4,000-megawatt wind facility centered in the town of Pampa, Texas. I made arrangements in the summer of 2008 to travel west with Pickens from his Dallas office to Pampa, a few hundred miles away, where 200,000 acres of this massive wind experiment had been marked for construction.
I was, if anything, more curious about Pickens himself than about the project he was planning. Pickens’s recent decision to advocate renewable energy struck me as a promising development for our energy future. As Pickens goes, I thought, so goes America: He is the oil titan who comes the closest (in both his achievements and his inherent contradictions) to being a modern-day John D. Rockefeller, and his choice represented a 180-degree shift in energy policy.
Pickens made his billions as an oil entrepreneur overseeing the production of more than 200 million barrels of petroleum from wells throughout the world. As a corporate profiteer, he famously tried to snatch Gulf Oil from the grip of Chevron. As a political booster, he has spent 50 years prodigiously supporting Republican campaigns. He spent millions to fund the Swift-boat ad campaign that damaged John Kerry’s bid for the presidency in 2004 — a stance for which he voices no regret to this day. Pickens is, in short, an unlikely hero for the modern-day environmental movement.
But in the summer of 2008, Pickens announced what he called the “Pickens Plan,” a massive push to free America from its dependence on foreign oil and to develop clean alternative sources of energy, including natural gas, wind and solar power. “I’ve been an oilman my entire life,” he said, “but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.” To some traditionalists in the oil industry, Pickens is a defector, a turncoat of sorts. Others — environmentalists and progressives included — consider him an enlightened soul, a converted sinner, a man in his twilight years (Pickens is in his 80s) who saw his industry hurtling toward doom and sought salvation in the clean energy gospel.
Along with the Pickens Plan came a massive PR blitz to promote it, a $58 million media campaign including print ads and TV and radio commercials as well as appearances on every program from Charlie Rose to ABC’s The View. In this, Pickens has aimed to create an unusual new embodiment of the 1970s grassroots environmental campaign, calling his crusade “a war without guns” and recruiting citizen-soldiers in a video posted on his website: “We have to have an army and you’re part of the army. Bring your friends, family, your church group, everybody together that you can think of.” More than a million and a half Americans have signed on to fight for his agenda.
I met Pickens on what turned out to be a fitting day for a discussion of wind energy — a blustery morning that, by the time I arrived at his office in downtown Dallas, was quickly evolving into a violent electrical storm. Wind, Pickens assured me, is a long-term investment that promises huge financial rewards: “I’m out to hunt elephants — I don’t get off the trail for rabbits.” His office attests to a man who hunts big game: It’s filled with luxurious leather couches and mahogany desks; cast-iron sculptures of bison; giant gilt-framed oil paintings of sunsets, running horses, and the Wild West; and photos of Pickens smiling alongside Republican presidents from Richard M. Nixon to George W. Bush, with jaunty personal notes from each commander in chief displayed.
I was surprised by Pickens’s appearance and manner. He wasn’t the ruthless, swashbuckling figure of legend who’d inscrutably stared from the cover of Time in 1985 above the headline “The Takeover Game — Corporate Raider T. Boone Pickens.” Instead, he was approachable and good-natured, even paternal in his manner. A fit, sturdy man with a tidy crop of silver hair, Pickens works out daily with a team of personal trainers and appears younger than his years, his age belied only up close by a discreet hearing aid, a slight hesitation in his walk, and an occasional tired droop to his steel blue eyes.
Pickens has brought an unexpected cowboy swagger to the clean energy agenda, describing the renewable industries, for instance, as “hotter’n a three-nutted tomcat.” He took polite but firm exception to my mention of Al Gore’s climate change initiatives. Though Pickens does see global warming as “a serious concern,” he makes no pretense to being an environmental do-gooder: “Don’t think I’m Al Gore. I’m not going to do a major investment in wind farms for the environment first and money second. I’m a fella who thinks with my wallet.”
Pickens believes that the world has already reached peak oil. “The industry can at a maximum produce 85 billion barrels a day, while the global demand is 86.4 billion barrels,” he told me. “You bet your ass that demand is gonna keep rising, along with the price.” While he has cheered proposals to open protected lands and offshore areas to drilling, he said that’s only one small element of a sound, long-term national energy strategy.
Pickens believes that America can cut its oil dependence in half by shifting our transportation sector to natural gas (for heavy vehicles) and electricity (for passenger cars) while substantially increasing wind development to supply 20 percent of our electricity demands in under a decade — up from roughly 1 percent today. “We also need efficiency, solar, nukes, any alternatives we can get,” he said, but stressed his belief that wind has the biggest growth potential.
For all his emphasis on financial pragmatism, Pickens confessed to having a sense of “mission” in his current work. “I think I was put here for two reasons,” he told me, “to make money and be generous with it, and to find good ideas and get them into play. I think I’ve got a solution to peak oil. The only other plans I’ve seen are to roll over and die.”
Read the rest here
