T. Boone Pickens, I'm On Board

While still at Investors Bank & Trust, I remember being horrified by the reading choices of my superiors. A director was reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, my manager was reading Jack Welch's Winning, and one of the senior fund accountants was reading some crap about being successful in business and the greatness of America. I felt superior to every one of them with a Dostoevsky novel tucked under my arm. And now what am I reading? The First Billion is the Hardest by T. Boone Pickens. I am filled with self-loathing. Only not.

I saw a televised meeting of the National Clean Energy Project (its members include Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Senator Harry Reid, and T. Boone Pickens) recently and was impressed by what T. Boone Pickens had to say. He seems like one of the few people in the country with an actual plan for weening us off of imported oil, and here's the skinny: stop using natural gas for energy generation and put it into transportation instead, build wind and solar capacity, put an energy czar in place to open up transmission from the Great Plains to the coasts, and increase efficiency across the board. You can get the details here. Why don't we already have all of these things? Lack of leadership.

So, I wouldn't recommend the book. It's mostly a biography, and not a particularly interesting one at that (not that Mr. Pickens didn't have a great life -- except for that period where he had a messy divorce, lost some of his friends, was forced out of his company and severely depressed). I picked it up because I wanted information about his energy plan, and that is withheld until the final chapter of the book. Visit the PickensPlan website instead. Or just watch the video that I included beneath this post.