Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) and T. Boone Pickens will be two of the headliners at the Clean Energy Summit 2.0 to be held in Las Vegas on Monday, August 10.

Former President Bill Clinton and former VP Al Gore will themem in a star-studded line-up to discuss the importance of alternative energy in creating new jobs in the United States.

Reid and Pickens co-authored an essay which was published in Nevada’s major daily newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

With Nevada’s unemployment rate above 12 percent, the state and the entire nation will be looking to the senior people at the summit for pointers on how clean energy can and will create good, new jobs which cannot be moved offshore.

In addition to the more than 3 million new jobs which would be created through building out of wind and solar capacity in the Great Plains and the Deserts Southwest, they also wrote about the jobs which would be created if domestic natural gas were to become a major transportation fuel in the U.S. We continue to import nearly two-thirds of the oil we use,

70 percent of which is used as gasoline for America’s 250 million cars and light trucks and as diesel for our 6.5 million over-the-road heavy duty trucks.

As members of the Pickens Plan New Energy Army know, we have enormous natural gas reserves in the continental United States. The most recent study estimates we have over 2,000 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas available which is more energy than the energy contained in the oil in Saudi Arabia.

To jump start the natural gas vehicle industry in the U.S. the Congress is considering a bill, the NAT GAS Act – of which Sen. Reid is an original co-sponsor of the Senate version. Reid and Pickens point out in their essay that

there are 10 million vehicles running on natural gas in the world but only about 146,000 of them are in the United States.

These bills will expand and extend tax incentives that will encourage the manufacturing of natural gas vehicles here in America.

That would expand the need for more manufacturing capacity, more maintenance and fueling facilities; and additional transmission capacity. All of which require American workers to fill jobs in America using American resources.

To read the entire essay by Sen. Reid the Boone Pickens click HERE.

— The Pickens Team