The Maine Sunday Telegram/Portland Press Herald ran a major editorial supporting the Pickens Plan. The PPH editors recounted a telephone interview conducted with T. Boone Pickens last week, writing that Boone said the U.S.

“needs a plan to end our dependence on oil imports from nations such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, which use the hundreds of billions of dollars we pay them to fight against our best interests abroad.”

The editors agreed with the national security risks we face by depending on OPEC oil:

“It’s hard to argue with his diagnosis about some of the OPEC countries. The Saudis support Wahhabi extremists and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez stirs up trouble with his neighbors while crushing dissent at home.”

The editorial then lists the principal points of the Pickens Plan:

o Creating “millions of new jobs” by building enough wind turbines to generate 22 percent of our power from that source, which currently supplies only about 3 percent of the total.

o Building a “21st-century backbone electrical grid” to get that power across transcontinental distances, which the regionalized grid we now have cannot support.

o Giving incentives to homeowners and businesses to upgrade insulation and other energy-saving improvements to keep demand down.

o And converting the nation’s 8 million commercial trucks from gas and diesel fuel to run on natural gas, which is in plentiful supply in this country.

The editors point out that our using 25 percent of the world’s oil is closely tied to our economy, which accounts for 20 percent of the world’s economic output. They then point out that Boone is not advocating using less energy, but

“he wants us to redirect our economy both in the types of fuel we use and the ways in which we use them to focus on reducing imports from unfriendly nations.”

The editorial concludes with kudos to Pickens by saying:

“He has done us a great favor by using his vast resources to point that out and spur us to greater efforts toward creating a comprehensive energy plan focused on domestic resources … He has also shown us how huge the problem is, and how much we will have to do to solve it.

“He makes it all sound easy, and it’s not. But he has given us his vision as a starting place — and reminded us that unless we do start somewhere, we will never accomplish anything”

To read the entire editorial, click HERE

— The Pickens Team