Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

T. Boone has done just that. Not only has he supplied some great ideas here, His Pickens Plan website has everything you need to share with friends from actual data to ideas on how to generate more and better power to ways to use the net to get the word out. I read through the site this morning, and based on my current level of knowledge about the problem I am largely in favor of the things he advocates and agree with the reasons why he advocates them. He represents to me one very sizeable improvement over what I’ve seen lately in the news — he actually HAS A PLAN — and is willing to move forward with it, regardless of the political hardball he’s going to run into. He gets my Silver Surfer award for 2008.

One thing I can say for “The Greatest Generation” (and I believe in using assets when and where they are, no matter how old they are, whatever works best is the way I look at life) is that when there was an engineering project to face they kept their eye on the ball in a way no other generation has to date — good or bad. The Hoover Dam, one of my favorite structures on the planet, is a case in point.

We are all part of one world, and advice of my elders I tend to take very seriously on some issues. Myself, I’ve had dreams of using the vast desert areas we have here in the USA for solar farms, and trust me, the State of Oklahoma can share a sizeable chunk of that acreage used to fatten cows for wind farms. It blows here like nothing I’ve ever experienced. If we had a modern, up to date grid, that could both store and transfer power across new methodology (to be invented) that did NOT contribute to environmental destruction in some way, I’d be the happiest person on the planet. Microhydro is another area I’d like to see advanced in areas that can support it. And there are always technologies, some on the drawing board, that will be improvements on these. Anything other than using irreplaceable resources!

So, go for it, Mr. Boone, and others like you who care enough to put your money where your mouth is. I am looking for more of us to do the same, even if it’s just NOT BUYING that extra non-recyclable whatever, or making yet one more trip to the store we didn’t need to make but got bored and so had to use the car. The devil’s in the details, fffolks, and well, seems like my generation in particular managed to plan their lives around the rugged individual — including planning communities all over the country for which owning a car is a necessity. We’ve let concepts of public transportation, so advanced in the EU for example, fall by the wayside in the last 50 years. You haven’t “made it” if you don’t have at least several cars, and other toys, in your driveway and garage. Unfortunately for us, we cannot sustain supporting that level of vehicle ownership for much longer (given availability and price of fuel). Nothing like painting yourself into a corner.

Big Oil, Big Auto, and the govvmint are going to have to take responsibility as well, you cannot have it both ways. the latest “Love us, we’re Green now” movements are running with a 38 year handicap. When the production lines were changed out in Michigan to accomodate the smaller compacts and subcompacts we should have paid more attention to what we were doing, instead of just cranking out smaller cars. We knew about all of this back then, but it was “oh, no one else is really worrying about it, it can wait.” Foreign Oil, all it did was save us from retrofitting our own structures. We’ve sold our souls in the process.