We’ve got a busy day ahead of us at PickensPlan.com. We are signing people up for the big E-RALLY following the debate tonight that I will be co-hosting with the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope.

If you haven’t signed up yet, click HERE to reserve your spot.

This will be an opportunity for you to send in your questions in advance. Carl and I will be sending your questions to the candidates to show them the New Energy Army is watching and listening. We need the candidates to focus on the need to reverse our dependency on foreign oil, not just with bumper-strip slogans, but with a real plan. The Pickens Plan!

I’d like this to be the largest E-RALLY in the history of the Internet, so get signed up and go find five friends, relatives, or folks in your office and get them to sign up, too.

Speaking of slogans, there is an article in this morning’s Financial Times about how oil production and refining in the Gulf of Mexico region is still less than 50% of pre-Hurricane Ike levels.

But that’s not what got my attention. You’ve hear me say that the easy oil has already been found in the Gulf. I’m a geologist and not a production engineer. But the last paragraph of that Financial Times story quotes a guy named Jeff Rubin who is the chief economist of CIBC World Markets about drilling in the Gulf.

He says that Hurricane Ike proved to him that the damage done by the hurricanes in 2005 was not an “anomaly” but has become “part and parcel of the operating conditions in the Gulf.”

That’s the background. What he says next is the important part for those who think we can drill our way out of this. Rubin says that the “growing realization” of storms in the Gulf damaging production “could slow down expansion in the Gulf of Mexico.”

If we’re at less than 50% production now, and the fear of storm damage will “slow down expansion” in the Gulf, I think you can see why we need to switch to natural gas for over-the-road trucks and government vehicles, express delivery and utility trucks; and city bus fleets as quickly as we can.

Join Carl Pope and me for the E-RALLY following the debate. See you tonight!

— Boone