7/11/08 A Response to T. Boone Pickens’s Energy Proposals: “Slim Pickins’”

By Peter Forman
Published: July 11, 2008
New York—T. Boone Pickens admirably proposes aggressive action to secure our energy future. Firstly, he errs by saying that "foreign oil” is the problem. The problem is oil—not just foreign oil.  Oil is a global commodity.

 

Secondly, while we applaud the wind and solar initiatives he advocates, natural gas is a weak response.

 

To shift cars from petroleum to natural gas, which also has security, economic, and environmental issues, is not only short-sighted but also the wrong play.

 

The world’s leading natural gas reserves are held by, in declining order, Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, USA, Nigeria, Algeria, Venezuela, and Iraq (see chart below).

 

The USA is already a natural gas importer. Increasing our reliance on these countries, or a global marketplace supplied by these countries, is not the solution.

 

The government needs to offer tax incentives for the purchase of any type of low/no emission vehicles.

 

And incentives for the power producers to generate electricity using ABDFF (Anything But Dirty Fossil Fuels).

By creating incentives and removing uncertainty that there will be demand for the products, private industry will rapidly invest and offer a multitude of clean vehicles and a variety of clean power solutions in which the tax payer does not bet on a single solution.

 

We can achieve clean energy independence.  But we must create a business and tax-policy landscape that incents it.

Without it we can not begin to move beyond oil.

Copyright 2008. MoveBeyondOil.org.  All rights reserved.

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