We moved the town hall operation down to Austin to talk to the students at the University of Texas.  As I always do, I laid out the problem – $700 billion a year being sent to countries who may not be our friends – so we can import 70 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil we use every day.  I told them that if we don’t do anything, over the next 10 years we will be importing 75 percent of our oil and we will be paying two TRILLION dollars a year because the price will grow to $250-300 per barrel.

Then I showed them how we can use wind to replace most of the natural gas which is used to produce electrical energy.  If we do that, we can reduce our oil imports by 38 percent.  At the same cost-per-barrel that we use to calculate the $700 billion per year that would be a savings of $266 billion.  A year.

Given the current state of our finances, we could sure use a quarter of a trillion dollars a year recycling through the U.S. economy rather than through the economies of Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.

We talked a good deal about the need to upgrade the national electrical grid.  I told them that if Thomas Edison came back and looked at the grid, he would see a lot of it that looked very familiar because it was built during his lifetime.

After we finished with the town hall, I went over to the Business School and did a lecture to a graduate level class on corporate governance.  I spent a good deal of my career trying to make certain that the executives of public corporations understood they were employees of the stockholders … and helping stockholders understand they were the executives’ bosses.


Here’s the old professor talking to a standing-room-only crowd in the Business School classroom.

These were MBA candidates and they wanted to know all about the Pickens Plan and what effect on the economy energy was likely to have over the next decade so they got the whole daily-pickens-White-Board deal and I guess they liked it because those who had seats stood up and applauded at the end.

Next week we’re off to Chicago.  More about that next time

— Boone