In the Wind

Gasoline prices have captured the attention of the American people, and nobody who lives in California (where we've experienced the largest fire event in state history, and it's still early in the fire season) or elsewhere in the West (persistent drought continues), the Midwest (massive flooding, storms) or the East (heat waves, tornados) can fail to be at least uneasy about what they hear global heating is doing to the planet. Even the Bush-tainted Environmental Protection Energy has just said that climate change poses substantial threats to human health in the near future.

So more people are speaking out and proposing plans that attack both problems, and more people are listening. Thursday Al Gore unveiled an ambitious plan to generate all of America's electricity with zero greenhouse gases within ten years--the length of time between JFK's goal of a man on the moon, and the realization of that goal. Senator Obama promptly endorsed Gore's proposal, and others--including well-known blogger on energy and investment banker Jerome a Paris--promptly showed how this idea can in fact be achieved. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.--my nominee for EPA or Energy secretary in the Obama administration--wrote about this last week.

Gore's proposal included new impetus for plug-in hybrids, and once again endorsed the idea of a carbon tax, which NASA climate expert Dr. James Hansen also proposed in his testimony to Congress.

Usually when gas prices go up, there is an outcry for more oil drilling in the U.S., including in offshore and wilderness areas. Sure enough, Republicans and some craven Democrats are talking that talk again--but there are signs it may not work this time. And one of the biggest indications comes from a very unlikely source.

If you didn't know who T. Boone Pickens was, if you've watched any TV recently you've seen his face by now. Pickens is a billionaire oilman and financial conniver, so ultra conservative that he bankrolled the despicable Swift Boat Veterans ads that libeled John Kerry's Vietnam War combat heroism and gave us four more disastrous years of Bush.

But now his face is on his own TV commercials, talking about the need for a new energy policy to radically cut the amount of oil America imports. But his proposal depends not on more domestic production, but on wind power for electricity (much as Gore's plan does) and natural gas for cars and other vehicles (the more controversial idea.) Pickens stands to make money on it all, which is actually a strong argument in its favor: it signals to other old capitalists that it's time to put their capital in new businesses. While Gore calls for a new Apollo program, Pickens wants private enterprise to get behind his idea, although he sees a big role for government, too: his metaphor is the federal highway program instituted by President Eisenhower in the 1950s.

His commercials have saturated TV for a few weeks now, and regardless of how good his specific proposals are, there is one moment that is as major a signal for the turning now underway towards a new renewable, sustainable clean energy future.

It's when Pickens looks into the camera and drawls, "I've been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we're not going to drill our way out of."

And sure enough, it is Pickens' state of Texas, American symbol of the oil economy, that made dramatic news Thursday: Texas, headquarters of America's oil industry, is about to stake a fortune on wind power.
In what experts say is the biggest investment in the clean and renewable energy in U.S. history, utility officials in the Lone Star State gave preliminary approval Thursday to a $4.9 billion plan to build new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from gusty West Texas to urban areas like Dallas.

Al Gore put it this way: "Yet when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges -- the economic, environmental and national security crises.

We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.

But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we're holding the answer to all of them right in our hand."

The answer my friend is at last blowing in the wind. And that's a wind of change.