T. Boone Pickens is peddling a plan called, very imaginatively, The Pickens Plan to save America from our dependence on foreign oil - is this for real, just a bunch of hot air, or worse?

According to the video on the left, the United States is in BIG trouble - we are transferring $700 Billion to foreign entities to purchase oil - that is Billion with a B folks! And it is per year… what a staggering number? Can you even imagine such a big number, try this on… $700 Billion looks like this… $700,000,000,000 - According to an ABC News Article, dated March 10, 2008, “Studies: Iraq Costs US $12B Per Month“- if we multiply that by 12, that is $144 Billion per year… not much when compared to the $700 Billion we are spending on foreign oil… Now, read this carefully… really let it soak in - Every year we are transferring just under 5 (4.86) times that amount for foreign oil outside of our country PER YEAR - or another way to put it - we could fight almost 5 wars as big as the Iraqi war for what we are spending on foreign oil EVERY YEAR! This has got to be the definition of insanity - Even another way to put this, which is maybe more scary is that we are sending out enough dollars to effectively fund 5 other countries to fight against us with the same budget in the Iraqi war…

There are some conspiracy theorists out there who suggest that this whole effort is a “cover” for Boone’s aquifer projects… and, you know what? It could be… I don’t have an answer to that - but I will say that the MUCH bigger issue is the United States transferring $7 Trillion dollars outside of our country over ten years! At the end of the day, I would suggest that if his company makes money on an aquifer project by getting us off of foreign oil, I think it could be looked at as fair commission for solving the much larger issue our country faces.

$700 Billion Dollars per year going OUT of our country and, for the most part into the hands of countries which hate America and want nothing more than to see the United States fall is insane - could we please agree on that?

What I appreciate about this approach is that Boone not only shows us how we got here, but he shows a way for us to get ourselves out of this mess. If you check out his site, and watch his messages the idea is to do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING we can to get off of foreign oil - solar power, wind power, offshore drilling, renewable energy, etc.

To me it seems that you can never make the crazy environmentalists happy (I did not say all environmentalists, I said the “crazy” ones *grins*). If you drill for oil so you don’t have to use FOOD to power the world, they complain; if you try to use renewable crops for fuel they complain that people are starving; if you say we can use the wind they try to frame some other negative picture - this group of people NEVER offer solutions which are applicable to the world we live in, just criticism and no answers…

T. Boone Pickens is putting up his own money and is not saying that wind is the only way. Boone’s Pickens Plan primarily focuses on swapping Wind for Natural Gas though, and I would say that one of the biggest pieces the Pickens Plan is missing is that we should also push for grants to companies like GM, Ford & Chrysler to create fully electric cars - screw hybrids and screw bailing them out, if all they are going to do is continue to make vehicles which continue to only run on oil - that doesn’t help! I would totally support grants to create fully electric cars which we can plug into our homes - in that way, we do not have to worry about the “infrastructure” debate which has raged for the last 20 years. This technology is also here today… in fact it was here in 1996 by GM, it was called the EV1 - and my belief is that if we can put a man on the moon in 4 years, in the span of 12 years, we sure as heck can create an electric car which has a range of 300 - 400 miles and can go 100 mph which can be plugged into a normal 120V outlet with a recharge time of less than 3 hours… In fact, if GM had spent the last 12 years perfecting their original design of the EV1, they would probably not be in front of Congress asking the American people to bail them out…

The way I see it, our dependence on foreign oil to fuel our vehicles (Cement Trucks, Rail Road Engines, as well as passenger vehicles) has become a matter of national security and I think it is a horrible thing that all we can do is continue to criticize each other instead of agreeing that ANYTHING is better than funding our enemies to the tune of $7 TRILLION over the next 10 years… Just think what our economy could do with an extra $7 Trillion dollars in 10 years… or more practically how many jobs GM, Ford, or Chrysler would be able to do create with people driving electric cars powered by electricity made here in America.

It is also exciting to think about what could happen as we started to export wind generated electricity offshore… America’s economy could become untouchable again!

Find more videos like this on PickensPlanI believe that our country, The United States of America has been the best country in the world and can be again if we only take the time and commit to doing the hard work it will take to get us there - By far, I think the hardest work we face is to be UNITED again, - We all know that there are folks who just want to watch America burn and the way they do that is by dividing us and pitting us against each other. Let’s take one small step and agree to unite and support T. Boone Picken’s Plan plan, because although it may not be perfect it sure as hell is better than where we find ourselves today!

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