T-Boone: Nobody Opposes Me

Well, maybe nobody in the Obama administration. The Texas billionaire just got a free ride to exploit us taxpayers because Obama’s group of green weenies will hand him anthing he wants. But there has been opposition.

T. Boone Pickens said in an interview this morning on CNBC that,

… but know this… we’ve never had a person that stands up and says your plan is not good. Nobody has said that… I don’t know… there’s not many op-ed pieces or any thing…

But Steve Milloy has written six FoxNews.com columns critical of the Pickens Plan — one of which Pickens’ team responded to on FoxNews.com.

The Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor has been critical of the Pickens Plan here and here.

Reece Epstein and David Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research have a lengthy critique here.

Here’s a Wall Street Journal article about Pickens’ critics, who include FedEX CEO Fred Smith and former Kansas governor Bill Graves, who now heads the American Trucking Association.

There are plenty more who have stood up against the Pickens Plan. Yet Pickens denies their existence in his effort to “swiftboat” America into his make-Boone-richer-scheme.

Visit the new Green Hell Blog from JunkScience.com

T Boone Playing Dirty

It's all out war

He buys his own army of government officials.

He boasts his own self-declared army and the support of 13 governors, 53 congressmen and 180 mayors, along with the Sierra Club and the American Lung Association. He has plugged his cause on countless news shows and spent $60 million of his own money on a massive ad spree.

He tries to sell directly to our president and both candidates.

Mr. Pickens took his plan first to President Bush. The two men met in the Oval Office in April.

“The president sat and listened for an hour and a half,” Mr. Pickens says. “And then nothing happened. No call back. Nothing. So I decided to do it myself.”

He didn’t fare much better with the two presidential nominees. When he sat down with Sen. John McCain in August, the Arizona Republican chastised him for “trying to pick winners” by so openly favoring natural gas. President-elect Barack Obama seemed more amenable when the two met in a hotel conference room in Reno, Nev., a few weeks later.

Mr. Pickens sketched out his plan in series of pie charts on a white board. “He didn’t do any back flips or anything but he did seem to like what I was saying,” Mr. Pickens says.

He threatened the trucking industry.

So Mr. Pickens shifted his focus to the country’s truckers, saying that all new long-haul trucks should be required to run on natural gas. That didn’t sit well with former Kansas Gov. Bill Graves, who heads the American Trucking Association.

The son of a truck operator, Mr. Graves laid out his objections over breakfast recently in Mr. Pickens’s suite. Many companies, he noted, are already turning to diesel hybrids. Natural gas-run trucks are about a third more expensive than traditional diesel trucks. Nationwide filling stations for natural gas don’t exist.

“How do you just airlift in the infrastructure to make this happen?” he said.

Mr. Pickens has recently taken to labeling his critics as un-American. Mr. Graves got the full dose.

“Bill, I just want to warn you on this,” Mr. Pickens said, putting down his fork. “I’m going to make you look unpatriotic for supporting foreign oil. I just want to make sure you understand that.”

Taken aback, Mr. Graves pointed out raspberries and croissants arrayed before them. The foreign oil helped deliver the food, he said. “We wouldn’t have any of this here if our trucks hadn’t delivered it,” he said. “So what’s more patriotic, Boone?”

He declared war.

Mr. Pickens has recently taken to labeling his critics as un-American.

“This to me is like a war without guns,” says Mr. Pickens between a flurry of meetings one recent morning in his hotel suite across from the White House.

The collapse of the financial market, and the vote in California killed his wind turbine project. The drop in crude oil from $160 a bbl to $40 a bbl, killed his propane project. So now he will take a piece out of Al Gore’s Global Warming Playbook, and launch an all out propaganda campaign to spread his lies. I can’t figure him out. He doesn’t need the money, and with the price of crude oil where it is, we should drill here and drill now, before the next upturn in prices. It’s never been clearer. But he still wants government money to pay for his far fetched schemes. It must be the thrill of the chase. I guess it still falls into the Follow The Money category though.

Source

T-boone At It Again

So just why is it that T-boone is backing so many alternative energy plans? In a word, Money. He has made billions in oil and claims he wants to drill, drill, drill. In the mean time he says we should run the country broke developing pie in the sky wind and solar power. Now his latest ad is about natural gas. It’s not new, it was in his original plan, but now he’s using some scare tactics about Iran to persuade us. Basically, he has bought up all the right of ways for the transmission lines for his new power sources, and despite his words to the contrary, the government will pay for most of the developement. That means You and Me through our taxes. He stands to make billions more and that begs the question, Why? He’s 80 years old and can’t take it with him, and I don’t see any great charities he’s backing. More background info Here, Here, and Here.

Steve Milloy has more on T-boone.

“Get this one,” says billionaire T. Boone Pickens in his latest TV ad, “Iran is changing its cars to natural gas and we’re not doing a thing here. They’re doing this to use less oil and sell it for $120 a barrel. We can switch our cars to natural gas and stop sending our dollars to foreign countries.”

Readers of this column know better than to take at face value the marketing of the so-called “Pickens Plan.”

So what’s the full story behind Iran’s move, and what would be the impact of switching our cars to natural gas?

Although Iran is a major oil and gas producer, it lacks oil-refining capacity and must import about 50 percent of its gasoline. To be less vulnerable to international pressure concerning its nuclear program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decided to reduce Iran’s reliance on imported gasoline.

He started with rationing in May 2007. But that quickly led to violent social unrest.

Ahmadinejad then decided to convert Iran’s new car fleet to natural gas. So 60 percent of Iran’s car production this year — about 429,000 vehicles — will be dual-fuel-ready, capable of running on both gasoline and natural gas.

But contrary to Pickens assertion, Iran isn’t trying to use less oil:; It’s trying to use less imported gasoline — and only to thwart a possible international gasoline embargo.

So should we use Iran as a role model? Think about that. IRAN…. as a role model.

Read the rest.

Tboone: He’s Only Helping Himself

The more I hear about Tboone, the more he sounds like Algore. Again I ask, why does a billionaire need to scam the public to earn another billion or two? He’s in his 80’s fercrisake! You can’t take it with you. Here’s another article from Steven Milloy of JunkScience exposing more of Tboone’s dirty dealings.

The more you learn about T. Boone Pickens’ plan to switch America to wind power, the more you realize that he seems willing to say and do just about anything to make another billion or two.

This column previously discussed the plan’s technical and economic shortcomings and marketing ruses. Today, we’ll look into the diabolical machinations behind it.

Simply put, Pickens’ pitch is “embrace wind power to help break our ‘addiction’ to foreign oil.” There is, however, another intriguing component to Pickens’ plan that goes unmentioned in his TV commercials, media interviews and web site — water rights, which he owns more of than any other American.

Pickens hopes that his recent $100 million investment in 200,000 acres worth of groundwater rights in Roberts County, Texas, located over the Ogallala Aquifer, will earn him $1 billion. But there’s more to earning such a profit than simply acquiring the water. Rights-of-way must be purchased to install pipelines, and opposition from anti-development environmental groups must be overcome. Here’s where it gets interesting, according to information compiled by the Water Research Group, a small grassroots group focusing on local water issues in Texas.

Purchasing rights-of-way is often expensive and time-consuming — and what if landowners won’t sell? While private entities may be frustrated, governments can exercise eminent domain to compel sales. This is Pickens’ route of choice. But wait, you say, Pickens is not a government entity. How can he use eminent domain? Are you sitting down?

At Pickens’ behest, the Texas legislature changed state law to allow the two residents of an 8-acre parcel of land in Roberts County to vote to create a municipal water district, a government agency with eminent domain powers. Who were the voters? They were Pickens’ wife and the manager of Pickens’ nearby ranch. And who sits on the board of directors of this water district? They are the parcel’s three other non-resident landowners, all Pickens’ employees.

A member of a local water conservation board told Bloomberg News that, “[Pickens has] obtained the right of eminent domain like he was a big city. It’s supposed to be for the public good, not a private company.”

What’s this got to do with Pickens’ wind-power plan? Just as he needs pipelines to sell his water, he also needs transmission lines to sell his wind-generated power. Rights of way for transmission lines are also acquired through eminent domain — and, once again, the Texas legislature has come to Pickens’ aid.

Earlier this year, Texas changed its law to allow renewable energy projects (like Pickens’ wind farm) to obtain rights-of-way by piggybacking on a water district’s eminent domain power. So Pickens can now use his water district’s authority to also condemn land for his future wind farm’s transmission lines.

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Tboone Sounding Like Algore

Look at this from Planet Gore.

Here’s how Gore works. He’ll cite one scientific finding that shows what he wants, and then ignore other work that provides important context. Here’s a list of his climate exaggerations from his well-publicized July 17 rant, along with a few sobering facts.

Gore: “Scientists . . . have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire [North Polar] ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.”

Fact: The Arctic Ocean was much warmer than it is now for several millennia after the end of the last ice age. We know this because there are trees buried in the tundra along what is now the arctic shore. Those trees can be dated using standard analytical techniques that have been around for decades. According to Glen MacDonald of UCLA, the trees show that July temperatures could have been 5-13°F warmer from 9,000 to about 3,000 years ago than they were in the mid-20^th century. The arctic ice cap had to have disappeared in most summers, and yet the polar bear survived!

Gore: “Our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory. . . .”

Fact: The reason there “seems” to be more tornadoes is because of national coverage by Doppler radar, which can detect storms that were previously missed (not to mention that every backyard tornado winds up on YouTube nowadays). Naturally, the additions are weak ones that might, if lucky, tip over a cow. If there were a true increase in tornadoes, then we would see a definite upswing in severe ones, too. If anything, the historical record indicates a slight negative trend in the frequency of major tornadoes, based upon death statistics.

Gore: “ . . . longer droughts . . . ”

Hogwash. The U.S. drought history, given by the Palmer Drought Severity Index, is readily available and extends back to 1895. There’s not a shred of evidence for “longer droughts” in recent decades. The longest ones were in the 1930s and 1950s, decades before “global warming” became “the climate crisis.”

Gore: “ . . . bigger downpours and record floods . . . ”

It’s true, U.S. annual rainfall has increased about 10 percent (three inches) in the last 100 years. But it’s equally true that this is a net benefit. Temperatures haven’t warmed nearly enough to increase the annual surface evaporation by the same amount, so what has resulted is a wetter country during the growing season. Farmers love this, because most of the nation runs a moisture deficit during the hot summer growing season. Increasing rain cuts that deficit.

Gore: “The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.”

This is likely James Hansen of NASA, Gore’s climate guru. He has written and given sworn testimony that six feet of sea-level rise, caused by the rapid shedding of Greenland’s ice, could happen by 2100. Why didn’t Gore defer instead to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization with at least a few hundred bona fide climate scientists? Its 2007 compendium estimates that the contribution of Greenland’s ice to sea level during this century will be around two inches. Gore also forgot the embarrassing truth that there has been no net change in the planetary surface temperature, as measured both by thermometers and satellites, for the last ten years.

Now look at what Tboone is saying.

“In 1970, we imported 24 percent of our oil. Today, it’s nearly 70 percent and growing,” he intones. Aside from the fact that the Department of Energy (DOE) puts the import figure at a more moderate 58 percent, Pickens gives the impression that imported oil is scary because it all comes from the unstable Mideast.

His TV commercials feature images of American soldiers fighting in Iraq and he likens the annual $700 billion cost of foreign oil to “four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.”

But hold the phone. Only 16 percent of our imported oil comes from the Persian Gulf — barely up from 13.6 percent in 1973, according to the DOE. Imports from OPEC countries are actually down — from 47.8 percent in 1973 to 44.5 percent in 2007.

Contrary to Pickens’ assertion that oil imports are growing, the DOE expects oil imports to decrease by 10 percent by 2030.

Pickens tries to shame Americans because, “America uses a lot of oil … That’s 25 percent of the world’s oil demand, used by just 4 percent of the world population.”

Some might think these figures make us sound greedy and wasteful.

But what Pickens omitted to mention is that the size of the U.S. economy in 2007 was about $13.8 trillion and the size of the global economy was $54.3 trillion.

This means that the U.S. economy represents about 25.4 percent of the global economy. So what’s the problem if a nation that produces 25 percent of the world’s goods and services needs 25 percent of the world’s oil output?

Would he prefer that we shrink our economy by 84 percent to match our share of world population?

Pickens plays the hope-squasher.

“Can’t we just produce more oil?” he asks. “The simple truth is that cheap and easy oil is gone,” he responds.

But there are hundreds of billions of barrels of oil in the form of oil tar sands and oil shale in North America, not to mention the more than one hundred billion barrels of oil in the outer continental shelf of the U.S. and on public lands like the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve (ANWR).

And don’t forget that coal-to-liquids technology can convert our 268 billion tons of coal into 20 times the nation’s current crude oil reserves, according to investment analysts. We have liquid fuels to burn.

While producing this oil may not be as easy as it was in 1859, when crude oil bubbled out of the ground in northwest Pennsylvania, it is much more feasible and far less expensive than Pickens’ fantasy of replicating the entire existing U.S. wind supply system every year for the next 15 years in addition to building the national infrastructure for natural-gas filling stations.

Finally, Pickens laments the $700 billion (less at current oil prices) “wealth transfer” from America to foreigners every year because of our “addiction.”

But is he also concerned about our “addiction” to other imports?

In 2007, the U.S. merchandise trade deficit — the difference between imports of goods from and exports of goods to foreign countries — exceeded $815 billion.

Contrary to Pickens’ demagoguery, “wealth transfer” is a term generally used in the context of estate planning, where money is simply “gifted” to heirs.

Our purchases of foreign oil, in contrast, are more reasonably known as “trade” — and trade is good.

Americans are not simply petro-junkies who mainline crude oil for the masochistic high of watching gas pump numbers spin faster. We produce goods and services with imported oil more than any other people on this planet.

I don’t know what would drive a billionaire to make such statements. Greed? Power? The need to be noticed? Well read the whole story and see just who Tboone’s new friends are.

Tboone’s New Buddies