Tom Friedman, author of the new book “Hot, Flat & Crowded” and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times spoke at an energy/environmental event in Kentucky the other day.

According to THIS report by Tom Kimmerer of “Sustainable Kentucky,” Friedman said that Boone is an “American nationalist who is able to grab people’s attention because of his prominence and the size of his commitment to wind energy.”

Tom Friedman also compared Boone to Wal-Mart and General Electric in his ability to focus the nation’s attention on the problem of foreign oil imports.

“It will take large players like T. Boone Pickens, Wal-Mart or General Electric forcing new renewable energy positions to get movement away from foreign oil and other unsustainable energy sources.” Kimmerer reports Friedman as saying.

Kimmerer finishes his report by writing, “What we desperately need in this state right now is the kind of creative thinking that Friedman and Pickens bring to our energy and sustainability challenges.”

We’re making progress! We’re making a difference!

– The Pickens Team

What’s your take on how Boone and his Pickens Plan are coming along?
The fact that you have someone who made his fortune in the oil and gas business looking at where the country needs to be 30 years from now and concluding that we can’t drill our way out of this problem and concluding that shipping $700 billion a year abroad to countries that don’t have our best interests at heart is not in our national interest, that’s when you get what I call American nationalists like Boone Pickens stepping across the aisle. That really gets a lot of people’s attention.

What do you think about his New Energy Army marching on Washington when President-elect Obama and the new Congress are sworn in?
I think he’s on the right track.

Why do you say that?
How did we get civil rights changes in this country? It happened basically when people took to the streets and politicians saw them, understood there was an aggrieved community there that wanted action, and the politicians decided that the cost of inaction on their part was greater than the cost of action.

The same thing has to happen on energy. There is only going to be real legislative change and support of renewable energy when enough politicians decide that the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action. And bringing lots of people, and I don’t mean five, ten, twenty, but hundreds of thousands of people to bear on Capitol Hill to drive that point home is really essential.

Congress also plays a critical role in incentivizing research and development, which brings to mind an anecdote from your book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. You were talking with Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s chairman and CEO, and he pointed out that the political climate in Europe was far more conducive for developing clean energy solutions.
I think what appeals to the big energy players about the European market is that you have national renewable portfolio standards that cover the entire European market. Over there I think it’s 20 percent by 2020, whereas in the States we have about half the states having renewable portfolio standards for clean energy, and every one of them is different. And so you’re very, very divided and chopped up in a complex market over here. And I think that very much affects where companies like a GE are investing.

The present state of the American economy also has a role to play, doesn’t it?
Yeah, I don’t want to say a lot, but there are some very exciting venture capital projects working and the question is how much are they going to be starved for capital in the current environment? I’m very worried about that because a lot of them got their first or second round of venture capital investing and now they are thinking about IPO money or whatnot to go to the next level and it’s becoming very hard for them.

How closely do you think the major oil-exporting countries are watching us to see whether or not America develops a sustainable energy policy?
I think they’re watching, but I think so far they’re not afraid because they’ve seen this play before. They know when global oil prices go down, it tends to kill the renewable energy industry. Happened in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And so I don’t think they’re exactly quaking in their boots yet. But I think they’re watching very closely especially when they see the politics shift and they see people like Boone or Wal-Mart, people from the corporate sector or even from the traditional energy business such as General Electric adopting new positions that gets their attention. They haven’t seen yet any really scale alternative to oil. Until they do, I don’t think they’ll be all that worried.
REMARKS CONDENSED AND EDITED BY ERIC O’KEEFE

You’ve heard the news and watched the coverage. There are lines at almost every polling location in the country.

If you haven’t voted yet, please join the Pickens Plan Petition drive at your polling place. You are likely to have to wait in line, so why not put the time to good use?

If you have already voted, please go back to your polling place later today to get as many voters signed up for the Pickens Plan Petition as possible.

In either case, please sign up HERE to volunteer. You’ll find everything you need!

If you can’t get petitions signed before you vote, please plan on sticking around for at least 30 minutes to get as many voters as possible to sign the Pickens Plan petition for energy independence after you’ve voted.

– The Pickens Team

P.S.  Watch coverage of the election returns tonight from Times Square in New York City.   Some members of of the New Energy Army will be there with Pickens Plan signs. They will also be doing live blogging from the scene so keep your computer logged into the Pickens Plan website!

Planning to vote on Tuesday? Think you might have to wait in line? Put the time to good use!

On Election Day we are going to have a massive Pickens Plan petition drive and visibility at as many polling stations as we can.

We need your help to demand America’s energy independence.

Please sign up HERE to volunteer. If you can’t get petitions signed before you vote, please plan on sticking around for at least 30 minutes to get as many voters as possible to sign the Pickens Plan petition for energy independence after you’ve voted.

– The Pickens Team

Congratulations Harry Groome of Arlington, Massachusetts, winner of the Pickens Plan Citizens Video Contest! We hope this video inspires others to join our cause.

Here is a very important story from the New York Times on how the Pickens Plan will have a DIRECT IMPACT on jobs in America!

NEWTON, Iowa

LIKE his uncle, his grandfather and many of their neighbors, Arie Versendaal spent decades working at the Maytag factory here, turning coils of steel into washing machines.

When the plant closed last year, taking 1,800 jobs out of this town of 16,000 people, it seemed a familiar story of American industrial decline: another company town brought to its knees by the vagaries of global trade.

Except that Mr. Versendaal has a new factory job, at a plant here that makes blades for turbines that turn wind into electricity. Across the road, in the old Maytag factory, another company is building concrete towers to support the massive turbines. Together, the two plants are expected to employ nearly 700 people by early next year.

…

“Getting [that many] jobs in one swoop is like winning the lottery,” says Newton’s mayor, Chaz Allen. “We don’t have to just roll over and die.”

…

The market is potentially enormous. In a report last year, the Energy Department concluded that the United States could make wind energy the source of one-fifth of its electricity by 2030, up from about 2 percent today. That would require nearly $500 billion in new construction and add more than three million jobs, the report said. Much of the growth would be around the Great Lakes, the hardest-hit region in a country that has lost four million manufacturing jobs over the last decade.

…

The unfolding financial crisis seems likely to slow the pace of development, making investment harder to secure. But renewable energy has already gathered what analysts say is unstoppable momentum. In Texas, the oil baron T. Boone Pickens is developing what would be the largest wind farm in the world. Most states now require that a significant percentage of electricity be generated from wind, solar and biofuels effectively giving the market a government mandate.

…

So it goes in Iowa. Perched on the edge of the Great Plains - the so-called Saudi Arabia of wind - the state has rapidly become a leading manufacturing center for wind power equipment.

“We are blessed with certainly some of the best wind in the world,” says Chet Culver, Iowa’s governor.

 

Here’s something. Time Magazine sent a guy down to Dallas a bit ago to talk to me about the Pickens Plan. On the Time Magazine website, they posted an article titled “Ten Questions for T. Boone Pickens” which you can read by clicking HERE.

They also posted a video of the interview which they took the 10 questions from. It’s pretty good and you can watch the video by clicking HERE

– Boone

Arkansas Congressman Mike Ross today became the 50th Member of Congress to sign the Pickens Pledge, joining T. Boone Pickens’ campaign to break America’s addiction to foreign oil. He joins more than 1,300,000 Americans who want to end our addiction to foreign oil now

Following is the list of names of all 50 Members of Congress who have signed the Pickens Pledge:

Shelly Berkley, D-NV
Dan Boren, D-OK
Charles Boustany, R-LA
Nancy Boyda, D-KS
Ginny Brown Waite, R-FL
Michael Burgess, R-TX
Yvette Clarke, D-NY
Tom Cole, R-OK
John Conyers, D-MI
Joe Courtney, D-CT
John Culberson, R-TX
Rosa DeLauro, D-CT
Phil English, R-PA
Mary Fallin, R-OK
Tom Feeney, R-FL
Jim Gerlach, R-PA
Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY
Virgil Goode , R-VA
Bart Gordon , D-TN
Gene Green , D-TX
Ralph Hall, R-TX
Dean Heller, R-NV
Bob Inglis, R-SC
Sheila Jackson Lee, D-TX
Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-IL
Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-TX
Steve Kagen, D-WI
Jack Kingston, R-GA
Mark Kirk, R-IL
Joe Knollenberg, R-MI
Randy Kuhl, R-NY
Kenny Marchant, R-TX
Dennis Moore, D-KS
Marilyn Musgrave, R-CO
Ed Perlmutter, D-CO
Collin Peterson, D-MN
Todd Platts, R-PA
Jon Porter, R-NV
Tom Price, R-GA
Mike Ross, D-AR
Bill Sali, R-ID
Pete Sessions, R-TX
Chris Shays, R-CT
John Sullivan, R-OK
Lee Terry, R-NE
John Tierney, D-MA
Mark Udall, D-CO
Fred Upton, R-MI
Tim Walberg, R-MI
Tim Walz, D-MN

The T. Boone Express touched down in Nashville the other night for a town hall meeting. This one was different because it wasn’t in a large hall with thousand of people. I was invited to be on the RFD television network by its founder and CEO, Patrick Gottsch.

The show was hosted by Orion Samuelson who has been in radio and television about as long as I’ve been in oil and gas.

One important thing we do at every event is talk to the local press. These press conferences are very well attended and help the folks in the local are fell like they are part of the Pickens Plan process.

In addition to the thousands and thousands of viewers, there were about a hundred people in the audience including a bunch of young people from FFA and 4-H clubs in the region.

I was glad to have them there because they’re learning the business of agriculture so they understood the deal when I talked about wind turbines on farm and ranch land in the wind corridor.

I did the white board lecture - the same one I do in the large town halls - and we took questions from the audience. But we also took calls from viewers around the country which I think made for an interesting night for the viewers.

One of the really good things Patrick did was to run as commercials the finalists in the Pickens Plan video contest. Remember we invited members of the New Energy Army to send in your videos. We chose six of them to be finalists. And we’ve just announced the winner. It’s the video by Harry Groome which you can watch by clicking HERE!

– Boone

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is the latest elected official to sign T. Boone Pickens’ Energy Independence Pledge.

From the press release:

“I am a conservative’s conservative, and as such believe in not just the sustainable use of financial assets, but in stewardship and the sustainable – or ‘conservative’ – use of natural resources. When you look at the numbers, the current trend lines are completely unsustainable with regard to our dependence on foreign oil,” Gov. Sanford said. “We believe the Pickens Plan not only recognizes that, but also recognizes that the only sustainable path for our country is to aggressively pursue alternative energies to meet our needs now and in the future. We also believe very strongly that this can be done in a market-based fashion rather than by government edict, and in that regard represents a real economic opportunity for our country. What Boone has done in building an army of support of over 1 million strong for this plan is to be admired, and will be key to elevating this debate at a national level.”

Time magazine put together a readers-fueled interview with T. Boone. Here’s a taste:

If you believe that we need cleaner, more independent sources of energy, how will you help convince those who will still profit from oil? Andrew Rowley SPOKANE, WASH.

The profit from oil–we peaked in America in 1970 with 10 million bbl. a day. We’re down to 5 [million bbl.] now. There will always be a place for oil, but we have to get over to the renewables, which are wind and solar, first. Those are assets that we have done nothing with in America.

Full interview here.

Let’s start off with a historical note. When it comes to wind and solar power, you have an unusual expertise. You won America’s Cup.
That’s right, I was the wind king. But I also like solar, because the sun is good, too. And I think solar and wind together make a dynamite combination.

What’s our next step?
The government needs to change its attitude.

That’s what Boone’s been saying. Are you ready to march on Washington with him and his New Energy Army in January?
Absolutely. I’d love to march in Washington. There’s a wonderful book that I just finished a couple of days ago that’s got a lot to say about Washington. It’s by Tom Friedman, a New York Times writer.

Hot, Flat, & Crowded?
That’s the one. He’s right on about the way Congress is still backing the fossil fuel industry. Actions speak louder than words, and wind and solar and geothermal are all at a serious disadvantage. We’re falling further and further behind. Other countries are miles ahead of us because they’ve had much more enlightened leadership as far as energy is concerned. We’re just stuck in a rut.

That hurts everybody – consumers, companies, and the country as a whole.
It makes me angry to read about it because if we give American ingenuity and entrepreneurship just half a chance, we can do a better job than anybody in the world. We’ve proven it time and again, but the Congress is so used to the big contributions from the fossil fuel industry that they haven’t moved at all. That’s got to change with the new administration and fast.

There was a passage in Hot, Flat, & Crowded where GE’s Jeff Immelt told Tom that GE had developed third-generation clean energy technology with wind turbines. But it wasn’t because of the U.S. market. It was because of the European Union.
Right. Countries like Spain and Germany are incentivizing clean, renewable energy and moving away from fossil fuels, but we’re not. It’s hard to believe that a country that likes to think of itself as enlightened and progressive and ahead of the curve would have allowed itself to fall so far behind and be doing virtually nothing about it even today.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED, CONDENSED, AND EDITED BY ERIC O’KEEFE

We hitched up the T. Boone Express and went into Charlotte, North Carolina to speak to a meeting of the editors of American City Business Journals. There are 41 of these newspapers which are completely focused on local and regional business stories.

I wanted to talk to them about the Pickens Plan because they will understand that the Plan is the path to economic growth.

I spent some time on the story of Sweetwater, Texas to demonstrate just how big an economic impact a wind farm can have on a community. Sweetwater, remember, went from under 10,000 people to over 12,000 when the wind farms came in to build and maintain the turbines, the transmission lines and equipment, and provide stores and services to 2,000 new people. A quarter of the jobs in Sweetwater are connected to the wind farms.

If you duplicate that 50 or 100 times up through the wind corridor - which is not a far-fetched number - you can be looking at about 135,000 local jobs connected to wind energy.

Add to that the engineering, design, manufacturing, and shipping jobs for the turbines and the design, construction and maintenance of the grid to move the energy east and west and the Department of Energy says the total number of jobs could end up being as high as 3.5 million.

That’s an economic impact that should be getting everyone’s attention.

On the natural gas I reminded them that the price of a barrel of oil has very little impact on the percentage of oil we are importing. While the outgo of American dollars is down from the days when oil was just short of $150 per barrel, we are still on a pace to send $350 billion overseas and our imports are still at about 70 percent of what we use every day.

Those two numbers: $350 billion and 70 percent represent the economic, and national security issues we need to address in the first 100 days of the new Administration.

As you know, because you are a member of the New Energy Army, the Pickens Plan works if we do both the wind part and the natural gas part. We have to do them both and we have to get started now.

– Boone

Boone will be on the RFD Network Wednesday night for a live town-hall meeting hosted by Radio Hall of Famer Orion Samuelson. Members of the audience will consist of 4-H and Future Farmers of America members, and it will be broadcast live beginning at 8:00 PM Eastern time.

RFD-TV is located on channel 231 on the DISH Network

RFD-TV is located on channel 379 on DirecTV

Check your local listings for the RFD Network Station on the cable system in your area

We’ve gone through the stacks and stacks of videos that members of the New Energy Army sent in and we’ve narrowed it down to six finalists. Now YOU get to decide the winning video.

Go to the VIDEOS page on the Pickens Plan website, watch the videos, and vote for your favorite.

The winning video will be posted on the front page of the Pickens Plan website. Help decide who the next Steven Spielberg will be by Viewing the Videos now!