Mother, May I Support Wind Power?

"This is one emergency we can't drill our way out of," conservative oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens says in his new TV ad promoting his Pickens Plan. The ad neatly eviscerates the rationale for drilling in ANWAR and off our coasts in just 60 seconds.

Pickens has made quite a splash with his plan for utilizing existing technology and domestic resources to rapidly shift America away from imported oil and gasoline approaching $5/gal. (Over 100,000 hits on the PickensPlan web site one day last week, according to his video blog.) By tapping wind power potential in the Great Plains “wind belt” and freeing up domestic natural gas now used for generating power for use in automobiles, Pickens claims America can in ten years’ time reduce foreign oil consumption by 38% and keep $300 billion a year from being transferred to foreign governments.

Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels will likely require a mix of energy sources for the next few decades: oil, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, hydrogen fuel cells, and decentralized generation (microgeneration). Sara Robinson suggested last week that many of our twenty year-old assumptions about nuclear technology are due for reexamination if we are to find a way out of our energy crisis.

And Pickens? His proposals, if implemented, just might do for the energy industry what Henry Ford did for manufacturing: change our paradigm for how America gets things done. He may, at the very least, retool America’s thinking about what the way forward is on energy independence.

Given Pickens’ Swift Boat ties, my wife is not ready to grant Pickens absolution or to trust his motives. On the other hand, if he’s right, he’s right.

No pun intended.

As recently as 2005, Pickens simply had it wrong:

"I was in wind energy for a minute ... I hate it. And when I got to looking at those damn things I said, I don't want to be a part of putting that on the horizon. We took a loss and got out of it and I'm glad I did."

Well, “Flip-flopping is getting a bad rap, because I think it is great,” as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Sunday on ABC’s This Week, suggesting that changing your mind is not a character flaw. Gasoline approaching $5/gallon has changed Pickens’ mind again. He is investing $2 billion in nearly 700 GE wind turbines (manufactured, by the way, at a plant across the interstate from where I am currently employed – both still in this country, for the time being).

But what is fascinating is how $5/gallon gasoline and Pickens’ U-turn on wind power finally may be the tipping point that accomplishes shifting America’s paradigm on renewable energy where years of liberal (i.e., DFH) activism on the issue did not. The irony is how many radical, lefty notions (often appearing first in California) conservatives have fought tooth and nail over the decades, disparaging proponents as dangerous, crazed, un-American, traitorous, socialist, or lately, unserious. They were radical ideas like Social Security, consumer safety, recycling, conservation, renewable energy, global warming, national health care, leaving Iraq … even rock and roll and long hair. Conservative leaders and followers oppose such ideas, that is, until they or their families are dramatically and negatively impacted, or until historical currents and popular opinion make their opposition no longer tenable. Or – like a game of “Mother May I?” – after a conservative figurehead like T. Boone Pickens comes along to tell them, “Yes, you may.”

Then comes the pivot. Shoulders relax. Brows unfurrow. And once again they lead America, proudly, confidently into a brighter tomorrow. Right as always.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future