Every president since Richard Nixon has pledged to move the country toward energy independence, and they’ve all failed, oilman and investor T. Boone Pickens told a crowd at Rice University on Tuesday.
“But we have a better chance now with President-elect Obama than we would have with McCain,” the longtime Republican fundraiser said, because it appears Obama is serious about understanding the issues and is developing specific plans.
It doesn’t hurt that Obama also seems to be favoring energy sources that Pickens has made central to his own campaign to reduce U.S. oil dependence — wind power and natural gas.
Pickens’ talk at Rice was his part of the road show for “The Pickens Plan,” a campaign he launched last August to get the country to cut its foreign oil dependence by one-third.
The plan, which he has spent $50 million to promote, calls for meeting more than 20 percent of the country’s electric needs through wind power and redirecting the nation’s abundant natural gas reserves away from power generation and into fueling cars and trucks.
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Every president since Richard Nixon has pledged to move the country toward energy independence, and they’ve all failed, oilman and investor T. Boone Pickens told a crowd at Rice University on Tuesday.
