Unlikely Allies

Before events totally overwhelm what I still consider the most significant story of the past month in terms of the future--the Obama energy plan--a comment on one fairly odd yet possibly pretty important sideshow.

You've probably seen the ad on TV--it was running constantly on the hot air cable channels for a couple of weeks: An old white man with a familiar name you couldn't quite place, except that he's clearly Texan, and incredibly wealthy --T. Boone Pickens--talking about the need for a new energy policy to make the U.S. energy independent by turning to clean energy sources.

Around the time that he announced his energy plan (as outlined in posts below), Barack Obama complimented Pickens and these ads, and he correctly picked out the single most important phrase in them:

"I've been an oil man all my life, and this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of."

Then after Obama's energy plan was announced, Pickens returned the favor and complimented it and Obama.

What's so extraordinary about this? Almost exactly four years ago, the Swift Boat Liars, with the willing connivance of the hot air networks, were vilifying John Kerry with patently false charges about his military service. Those Big Lie ads were largely financed by a billionaire oilman and hedge fund investor: T. Boone Pickens.

This year, Pickens is touting the need for a new energy plan in television and radio ads, at a budgeted cost (according to Forbes)of some $44 million.
The ad campaign has gotten a lot of free media attention as well. The first ad is already such a big deal that when Al Gore presented his proposal for carbon-free electricity within a decade, one of the first people the news media went to for reactions was T. Boone Pickens.

The first ad in the series was quite effective. Pickens makes the case that the U.S. is importing some 70% of its oil, leading to what he calls the largest transfer of wealth in history. He is basically touting wind power to generate America's electrical power, freeing up natural gas for a new generation of cars and other vehicles. While experts find lots of problems with the second part of his prescription especially, I don't think there is sufficient recognition for the power of this ad to change the dynamic, especially in one particular way, with one particular sentence.

For as usually happens in the U.S., high gas prices lead to talk of alternatives--alternative fuels, transport systems, conservation methods. But also talk of more drilling for more oil in America. Sure enough, Republicans and some craven Democrats are once again calling for off-shore oil drilling, and they've never really given up trying to open up wilderness areas.

Everyone is wondering how the politics of this will play out in this crucial election year. Then along comes the ultra-conservative, paradigmatic capitalist billionaire, and a Bush-financing Texas oil man to boot. And in this first ad, after laying out the problem of imported oil, he looks into the camera and in his Texas drawl he says this: "I've been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of."

Pickens stands to make lots of money from wind power, and so does Texas, which is rich in wind farms and recently the Texas state government made what they said is the largest single investment in clean renewable energy in U.S. history--a $4.9 billion plan for new transmission lines to bring wind power from those farms to big Texas cities.

But that's part of the point for Pickens--he says he wants the private sector to lead the transformation, and though he sees a major role for government, his metaphor isn't JFK's challenge to get to the moon within a decade (Gore) but Eisenhower's federal highway building program of the 1950s.

So whatever is right or wrong about Pickens' approach and specific proposals, I am fascinated with that one sentence--and what it might do to start this transformation from another direction, or at least blunt the argument that more oil drilling is the answer. And so for the moment (even though Pickens hasn't endorsed a presidential candidate), the two unlikeliest allies of the campaign so far are Pickens and Obama.