John Podesta – former White House Chief of Staff under President Bill Clinton – is the president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund one of the principal organizers of this year’s Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mr. Podesta, in an early-morning appearance on CNBC, talked about two of the major pillars of the Pickens Plan: Refitting homes and buildings to make them more energy efficient, and using our enormous supplies of natural gas as a bridge fuel to increasing the use of renewable energy sources.

Mr. Podesta said that Summit participants would be discussion a new initiative to re-fit “50 million buildings – about 40% of the nation’s building stock” to be more energy efficient. Energy efficiency has been a major tenet of the Pickens Plan. Podesta went on to say that this plan would create 625,000 permanent jobs over the ten-year span and would, at the same time, reduce overall energy costs to consumers.

Mr. Podesta also talked about natural gas as part of the Summit agenda:

One thing I think we’ll have a good discussion about today, Boone Pickens will be here is the vast supply of natural gas we have in this country. It’s a resource in America. And that is exploitable now because of new technology, American technology, which can get after and extract the gas from oil shales. Those are distributed across the country. They’re in Arkansas, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other places that can’t be exploited.

Indeed, we can move a good deal in our view, our heavy-duty trucks, bus fleets, vehicle fleets in cities from gasoline to natural gas. That will keep the money here at home and the production here at home instead of sending that money overseas to what are some friendly regimes, but many unfriendly regimes as well as we transfer our wealth to oil producing countries. So we think there’s a very major play there to produce the kind of net-net gains.

Boone Pickens will be joined by former President Bill Clinton, former VP Al Gore, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid among others in this important conference.

— The Pickens Team