Famous PBS interviewer Charlie Rose rejoined the CBS news magazine show 60 Minutes and his first segment was a piece focusing on T. Boone Pickens and the Pickens Plan.

CHARLIE ROSE: It seems to me that Boone Pickens is a guy who needs an idea, and a challenge. He almost needs to be at war all the time.

BOONE: They call ’em crusades. I’ve been accused: “You’re a crusader, Pickens.” I don’t start out that way, but I have to admit, sometimes it ends up kind of like a crusade.

Charlie Rose described the Pickens Plans a plan to “reduce oil imports by 30 percent in 10 years and save the country hundreds of billions of dollars.”

BOONE: Whatever we spend for energy here at home creates jobs, taxes, and the economy grows.

CHARLIE: So this will stimulate the economy in your judgment?

BOONE: Oh, yeah. We can do so much here at home with the money here instead of letting it go out of the country.

Explaining to 60 Minutes viewers, Charlie Rose said the Pickens Plan calls for replacing two million trucks, “the big rigs that move goods around the country,” Rose said. “Trucks account for about a quarter of the amount of oil we import every year.”

CHARLIE: Anybody – whether it’s George Bush or Sarah Palin or John McCain who thinks you can drill your way out of the problem is …?

BOONE: You don’t have a chance. There’s no way. We”re importing 12 million barrels of oil a day. Ok, let’s just say we were going to replace 12 million barrels by drilling in America. We’d be bigger than Saudi Arabia.

Charlie Rose then told the 60 Minutes audience about the wind power part of the Pickens Plan. Including the building of wind farms and the government mandating rights-of-way to build out the grid.

“That kind of urgent action,” Rose said, “hasn’t been taken since President Eisenhower commissioned the Interstate Highways to move military equipment during the cold war.”

Boone responded that this “needs to be identified as an emergency, is what it is. It’s a crisis. We’re at war with no guns.”

CHARLIE: Suppose it doesn’t work. Supposed the Pickens Plan doesn’t happen. What happens to the country?

BOONE: The plan then is foreign oil. You’re totally at the mercy of foreign oil.

Those of us on the Pickens Team and all of us in the Pickens Army already knew that; now the entire 60 Minutes audience knows it, too!

— The Pickens Team