T. Boone Pickens is a Whirling Dervish of a man. At 84, he spins from Congressional appearances to CNN and then stages his own town hall meetings on alternative energy.

Pickens now makes more appearances than either of the presidential candidates. His are for alternative energy policy, and he means to get out the vote.

According to Reuters, "Pickens said on Wednesday he is creating an "army" of business leaders and mainstream Americans to lobby for his plan to revamp U.S. energy policy in favor of wind power and natural gas over imported oil."

Walking in the footsteps of William Jennings Bryan, Pickens has created his own populist "cross of gold" with an urgent message which is that imported oil will ruin the US economy. He is, in his old age, almost certainly right.

Any realistic US energy policy died at Three Mile Island in 1979. A modest amount of radioactivity was released from the nuclear plant and the development of an energy source which could have provided the majority of electricity in the US was arrested. Coming in the same decade as the Arab Oil Embargo, the government had some chance and popular support to whip opinion in favor of alternatives to crude even if some of them had modest risks.

Pickens push is mostly in favor of wind power and natural gas. Building out the infrastructure to harness the output of windmills would take several years and tens of billion of dollars to build. Pickens knows he will be dead and buried by then, but he has asked that he rest far from the oil derricks he helped to build.

Pickens’ plan to build an "army" behind his initiative to accelerate the use of alternative energy will likely fail because of the habit of both the government and the citizenry to believe that problems can be solved with a minimum of effort. Since oil prices have been dropping lately, the news tempts more such deranged thinking.

There is nothing wrong with Pickens’ message other than it falls on inert minds.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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