You recently signed the Pickens Energy Independence Pledge. Tell us why.
We have certain industries that we watch out for. We have certain requirements in terms of intellectual properties that we don’t want to fall into the wrong hands because we think it’s of strategic importance. And yet these days, there’s nothing more strategic than our ability to run the economy, which is based in large part on energy. So I think that Boone is on to something from the standpoint of watching out for our strategic interest. I think he’s on to something from the standpoint of not going out of our way to arm those folks who oftentimes don’t wish us well. Whether it’s Chavez in Venezuela or folks in the Middle East, you can’t be shipping the kinds of dollars that we’re shipping and expect good things to happen either from the standpoint of arming their interests with dollars or from the standpoint of shipping the dollars out of our country.
You also mentioned an environmental component.
I’m a conservative’s conservative and that means being conservative not just with financial resources, but I think natural resources as well. If in fact we can put up a windmill that produces the energy but doesn’t have some of the byproducts that some of our current sources do, I think it’s something worth pursuing. So I signed on.
But you signed the pledge with a qualification.
I put a caveat at the bottom because I do believe that the private sector – not government – but the private sector is the best way of ultimately reaching these goals that Boone has laid out. But somebody’s got to draw a line in the sand and spur the next administration to indeed draw a line in the sand on energy independence. I’m very pleased that Boone has done so.
So your point is that government needs to raise the bar and then step back.
Patton once said in military terms when you tell a young lieutenant to take the hill, you tell him to take the hill. What you don’t do is tell them how to take the hill. There could literally be a thousand different ways of getting the job done, but if you prescribe specific steps – “You’ve got to go this route and you turn left and you go right” – then it doesn’t take into account the things that could go wrong, the different obstacles that can come that soldier’s way, any of the fog of war.
And so I think that’s what is important here. Boone has been great for awakening the American public to the need for us to demand of our political leadership that they draw the line in the sand and say, “We’re going to take this hill.” I mean Kennedy didn’t say, “I’ll tell you what. I hope that maybe we could make it to the moon.” He said, “We will put a man on the moon.” He was definitive. I think we need that kind of clarity when we think about this notion of energy independence for its implications as a matter of national security, for its implications in the value of the dollar, for its implications in every one of our wallets.
INTERVIEW CONDUCTED, CONDENSED, AND EDITED BY ERIC O’KEEFE
