T. Boone Pickens Recruits the I-Man

T. Boone Pickens, who goes by Boone, had nothing to do with the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, despite sharing the company’s initials. But he is an oil man, and though his knowledge on this particular spill is limited, he compared the incident to an plane crash.

“It was well-manned, with good pilots, but something goes wrong, there’s an accident, a lot of people are killed,” said Boone.

For the last few years, Boone has been touting energy independence for America using natural gas and wind turbines. “It’s a security issue,” he told Imus today.

Of the 14 million barrels of oil the U.S. imports each day, five million of it comes from OPEC. “I don’t consider them to be friendly people to us,” said Boone. “I think our money is going to pay for both sides of the war. If we could get loose from OPEC, we could get loose from the Middle East, and we could come home. But we’re kinda stuck.”

To un-stick ourselves, Boone recommends turning to natural gas, and doing so with fervor. “It’s great for heavy duty trucks,” he said. “If we put eight million heavy duty trucks in the United States on natural gas, we’d cut OPEC in half.”

Boone wishes President Obama would require that all federal government vehicles, from this point on, use domestic fuel, whether in the form of ethanol, natural gas, or a battery. “When he says that, it sends a signal,” said Boone.

There is legislation in place in both the House and the Senate that Boone called a “standalone natural gas act.” He’s not sure it will pass (“They’re trying to put some other things with it,” he told Imus), but in the meantime he’s focused on communicating his message any way he can. 

“There are over 20 million people on the website,” he said, referring to PickensPlan.com, where the 1.7 million members of the Pickens Army go to watch videos of Boone and to read about his ideas.

Imus, set to become the newest member of the Army today, was ecstatic to join. “How great is this!” he exclaimed when told he’ll be on next week’s “Boone Cam.”

The Pickens Plan is necessary because, in Boone’s opinion, “This is going to have to start at the grass roots level.”

The reason? “Every guy and every woman that has run for President of the United States for 40 years has said, ‘Elect me and we’ll be energy independent!’” said Boone. “And they don’t know what in the hell they’re talking about.”

We couldn’t have said it much better ourselves.

-Julie Kanfer