The celebrations, meetings and other activities attached to the Inauguration of Barack Obama have begun in Washington, DC. One of the meetings was a gathering of the Sierra Club in downtown Washington with featured a conversation between Executive Director Carl Pope and T. Boone Pickens.
Pope and Pickens have been working together on the Pickens Plan since shortly after Boone announced the plan last summer.
About 100 members of the Sierra Club joined Carl and Boone – including U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash) – to listen and ask questions.
Boone went first and laid out the scope of the problem. Then he said:
We can solve the problem. We can do it with renewables. We have the best wind in the world. We have plenty of solar.
The barriers to solving this previously were leadership and cheap oil. It has always been easier to use their cheap oil than to use our renewables.
On using oil, Boone talked about why we “can’t drill our way out of this problem.”
I’m not opposed to drilling – although I’m sitting with a group that’s not for it. If we got two million barrels a day from all the proposed drilling I’d be pleasantly surprised.
Two million barrels, and that’s at the optimistic end. We’re importing 11 million barrels a day. So, that’s why we can’t drill our way out of this.
Boone then suggested the establishment of a national Wind/Solar Bank – which would finance the development of our wind and solar capacity.
He then talked about moving from imported diesel to domestic natural gas as a transportation fuel, especially for heavy trucks.
You can’t move an 18-wheeler with a battery. The only resource available to replace imported diesel for over-the-road trucks is natural gas which is 60% cleaner than diesel. Also, American natural gas is the cheapest in the world because of the huge resources which are now recoverable.
Pickens finished his remarks by saying
When we’re tasked to do something in America, we do it. We haven’t been tasked to solve the energy problem.
I am very eager for this President to say, “This is something we can do, together” and if he brings Conservatives and Liberals together – so it is not a political deal – we can and we will do it.
When Carl Pope took the microphone he started by pointing out “If Boone and I agree on something, it tells us that it is something which should have been solved a long time ago.”
Pope said that President-elect Obama has “gotten his transition team to ‘play above their game’ in talking about changing the way we make and use energy in the United States. He told this story about meeting with the Energy Transition Team:
Carole Browner – who will be the senior Energy and Environmental person in the WH told me that her instructions from Obama included: Anything you send to us will be posted to the public. Someone asked, “How do we send you something we don’t want posted to the public?
She said: If you don’t want it posted to the public … don’t send it.
Pope’s call to action was:
The challenge for all of us is to sit down at every meeting and when someone says “that’s a good idea, but we can’t do it, we can’t behave that well…” we have to learn to say, “Wait a minute, we need to learn to behave better.”
He said that we should not put all the burden on Barack Obama.
One person can’t change society unless the members up and down that society are willing to participate in that change.
— The Pickens Team