Boone Doggle

Wall Street Journal ^ | August 6, 2008 | HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

[djsherin]

Boone Pickens may be a fine man, and has played a colorful and useful role on the American stage for decades. But his "energy plan," which he's spending a fortune to promote on cable TV, is not a plan.

Asserting that something would be good to do is not "a plan." Saying how to do it is "a plan." By this standard, what the legendary oil man is devoting $58 million to pitch hardly amounts to a decent slogan.

He would replace natural gas in electricity production with wind, and use the natural gas to power cars. He fails to mention any practical theory of how to get there -- that would really be "a plan." Instead, he relies on the deus ex machina of Congress, waving a legislative wand to make people do things they would choose not to do, given the extravagant and unjustified costs involved.

Having reasons is not "a plan" either, but Mr. Pickens has his reasons. He says we spend $700 billion a year on foreign oil, which he calls a "transfer of wealth." But exchanging money for oil at the market price is an exchange of things of equal value. If we didn't value their oil more than our dollars, we wouldn't participate in such a bargain.

[Bommer]

Put you money where you mouth is T Boone! Find 1 city of 50,000 where they will all agree to live off the grid in favor of your windmills as well as use only natural gas; finance it with your own money, and monitor them for 5 years. Then weigh the costs and outages they experienced when the wind won't blow and then sell this crap to the public!

[biff]

Wow! Your’re rich enough for your underwear to come in sets?(put a Bama tax on this guy) LOL

[Para-Ord.45]

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy2/pdf/chap5.pdf

page 16, table 35