Harry Reid's Clean Energy Summit
I get a lot of invitations to events and activities, and the truth is, I have to decline a good number of them. But last year when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asked me to attend the National Clean Energy Summit at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, I didn't have to think twice. I said "yes" in a heartbeat.
Harry Reid has never shunned hard work. He may be Majority Leader of the United States Senate, but when he's in Washington he's among the first to arrive at the Capitol each morning and one of the last to leave at night. He doesn't like to waste time -- his or yours -- which is why I agreed to attend his summit. So did President Bill Clinton and Governors Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Jon Huntsman of Utah, and Bill Ritter of Colorado.
Former White House counselor Paul Begala, who covered the event for CNN, wrote, "Only Reid could bring former President Bill Clinton and right-wing Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens together to find common ground."
Sorry, Paul, but using clean energy to reduce America's dependency on imported oil isn't common ground. It's common sense. That's why President Clinton and I joined Senator Reid, Speaker Pelosi, Energy Secretary Chu, and former Vice President Al Gore in Washington at a second summit about the clean energy economy in February. It too was hosted by John Podesta's Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Today, Senator Reid will be hosting a third summit: the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 at UNLV. The focus will be the countless ways clean energy can generate the jobs our country needs not just to bring unemployment down from 9.4 percent but, as Tom Friedman put it, to create "a greener America," one whose economy is powered by green collar jobs.
President Clinton and Vice President Gore will be on hand and continue to show leadership. I'm really looking forward to hearing from Gov. Schwarzenegger, who will be discussing the progress being made in California. That state is always an innovator. I can't think of a better venue for Roy Willis of the Propane Education & Research Council to talk about the many economic and environmental advantages of this key domestic fuel.
Another fuel that will be the focus of much attention will be natural gas. Our country's natural gas reserves contain more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. It's an opportunity we can't pass up, and companies like AT&T have already recognized the advantages of converting their fleets to run on natural gas, propane -- anything but imported oil. Each one of those conversions means manufacturing jobs, technical jobs, and service sector jobs. If I could single out one step to jump start our green economy, it would be for the House and the Senate to pass the NAT GAS Act when they return in September.
President Obama has been an adamant supporter of the green economy. Just last week, he awarded more than $2 billion in grants to help U.S. companies bolster large-scale manufacturing lines for ultra-modern batteries.
Today at the Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, we'll be discussing a lot of options. Why? Because everyone knows we must do something now. The chief economist at the International Energy Agency just told Britain's Independent newspaper that "the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilisation depends is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years -- at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated."
We're running out of time, folks. Leaders such as Harry Reid have the answers and are willing to do the heavy lifting. Let's support them 100 percent.
Follow T. Boone Pickens on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pickensplan
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it is common sense Boone but your preaching to the converted......it's not the left that doesn't want to be slave to the Saudis.....I think your efforts need to be be directed to the people you helped run the country for years, Republicans, they don't believe ice melts when it gets warmer and think "drill baby drill" is an energy policy.......you can try to tell them the facts and bang your head against the wall......
Now you say “what can we do with cellulose”.
The Stirling engine was invented over two hundred years ago. We used it in western Nebraska to pump water for livestock in the 1880s. They used dried cow pies as fuel. Now that’s what I call resourceful. The engine fell out of use with the coming of the power lines and other forms of power.
NASA has done some testing on Stirling cycle engines and I believe powdered cellulose could be used as a fuel for operating a Stirling cycle engine. There is a NASA report on its performance at:
mac6.ma.psu.edu/stirling/reports/19970012689_1997021349.pdf
There exists an astounding amount of technology to handle and burn powdered dry fuels. We could use these to develop systems to utilize the Stirling cycle engine in place of the internal combustion engine and likely solve the energy problem using fuel we have ignored since the internal combustion engine was developed. The Stirling engine is twice as efficient as the internal combustion engine and can run on any fuel including sunlight.
Have you ever thought that we can build a car that gets > 200,000 miles per gallon of gas? Really! We can use cellulose. Agricultural land that is harvested leaves tons and tons of cellulose on the ground to decompose into heat and CO2.
Some of the cellulose will be woody plant material, unlikely to decompose during fall and winter and left unharvested, will likely end up as understory storing carbon and heat energy. This material can often be released to its constituent parts, heat and CO2 during wildfires with no positive human benefit. This is common in California causing devastating pollution and likely contributing to climate change.
The cellulose I’m talking about is an enormous energy reserve that is replenished annually and oxidized annually and the whole process repeats itself over and over every year. It will happen with or without us using it. It is the source of the oil and coal reserves we are using. If we were to intervene in the process and store it for our use we could sequester carbon in phenomenal amounts. Then, when we did use the energy it would occur for the benefit of humanity.
I believe we are looking past the solution of our energy problems. Most of the technologies we are pursuing, in my opinion, are incomplete solutions.
Wind and solar electrical power is essentially moving heat around. There is no reasonable method of storage and since we are trying to keep sequestered carbon sequestered, oil, natural gas, propane, and coal are out. Using these releases CO2 that are sequestered permanently until pumped out of the ground.
Cellulose is the result of the only practical way of turning energy from our source, the sun, to a storable form. However, if we allow it to burn rapidly or oxidize slowly by decomposition the result is the same, the stored energy turns to heat and CO2 and they are released to the atmosphere and wah-la two elements of global climate change.
In Nebraska on my farm we raise 10,000 lbs of hay per acre/year. This is mostly cellulose and is approximately 7000 Btu per lb. or 70,000,000 Btu / acre. On my 640 acre farm I could raise 44,800,000,000 Btu / year of stored stable energy and several tons of sequestered carbon. What’s more if I don’t raise anything but weeds I will probably still raise 44,000,000,000 btu of stable energy until it goes dormant and starts decomposing releasing heat and carbon back into the atmosphere just the same as the other 650 million acres of public land and most of the 1.3 billion acres of private land in the U.S..
Pickens is only interested in the water rights he has obtained in the West Central US. He has shown by his previous actions he doesn't believe in the truth. He has no problem with lying in order to achieve his goals. It would be best if he would go away. He is the least likely person to truely deliver on a promise to America.
To those of you who are rejecting Mr. Picken's "plan" because he backed the Swift Boat Ads: Forget TBP. Pay attention to the idea instead.
At this moment, the only.. the only thing I despise more than Republicans (after that abortion we nominated to run against Obama) are the liberal Democrats.
Yet I can find positive things to say about our President. I'm willing to listen to him. Not everybody who disagrees with you is wrong about everything else.
If his plan is adopted, and NG IS used as it should be, yes, the price will rise. And TBP will get richer. So will landowners, and NG drilling companies, and landmen, and O&G attorneys.
And they will spend their money here in the US.
AND, we won't be funding Al Qaeda, and other terrorist states.
What part of that doesn't work for you all?
Or would you rather just whine about it?
Can you list the oil field that Al Qaeda, trained and supplied by the Reagan and Bush administrations, uses for their funding? Maybe list the oil company they sell to?
If your tired of lies here is some truth.
Al Qaeda was formed after the Afgan war with Russia by Osama.
Osama funded his groups actvities early with his share of his families fortune made from business funded with Saudi oil money. That is how he became thier leader, he paid them with oil money.
Today rich Saudi families are the major source of Al Qaeda funding.
See A. Siegel's Profile
There are real problems within the plan, totally putting aside T Boone's funding of Swift Boats and the profits that he would make from being so heavily subsidized across multiple business interests.
The problem is that the plan is:
a - Financially very inefficient. There are far more cost effective ways to spend Federal resources on cutting our reliance on foreign oil than subsidizing moving toward natural gas toward transport. For example, spending the money on electrification of rail and reducing rail bottlenecks for transport could led to a reduced daily demand of 2.5+ million barrels, or over 10 percent of US demand, in a decade at about the same price as T Boone's plan would cut daily demand by about 10-20%. We could spend $10-20 billion on realtime feedback systems for all post 1996 cars and require it of all new cars. That would cut demand by perhaps 1 million barrels day. (At $60 barrel, roughly $20 billion/year in reduced import requirements.)
b -- doesn't do anything about coal and is misdirecting natural gas. Natural gas is a natural partner with intermittent renewable energy sources. We need to retire coal from electricity, not natural gas.
Etc....
Hey T Boone! Thanks for the second 4 years of BushCo!
I heard on the news that Chevy has developed a car that get 200 mpg. If he is on the right side of this issue, is willing to work for it, and has the money to contribute it is best to forgive his crime against Kerry. I really don't understand why he did that to Kerry, a war hero, who later realized that the war was wrong. Kerry risked his life. It was so outrageously shameful. The only good thing that came of this swiftboating was that Obama was ready for it. I assume Pcikens is very sorry knowing what has transpired with Bush as President. Kerry deserves a public apology.
He has some good concepts, but he is not the person to work with or depend upon. He hasn't done the mathematics on so many wind turbans or natural gas pipe lines to North America. He just wants to use his oil money to make more money, but can't back up the data yet.
He should just take a Swift Boat and see if his idea is of any use.
T Boone Pickens was the person who funded the Swift Boaters which installed Bush into power. He did terrible damage to this country. Shame on him.
Truth. And for this he shoud be given no credibility
I am a Viet Nam vet. I hate this man. I wouldn't trust anything he says. I am against anything he proposes on spec.
Ditto. Exactly.
He did irreparable harm to himself, his influence, and his country with his funding and association with the Swiftboaters. He should never be forgiven for it. Just as we never forgive law breakers who can never get work after their prison term.
He should be ignored. He should be disdained. He should be held in disrepute. He should not be trusted.
I read the other day that our newest Senator, Al Franken, refused to recognize, meet, and chat with TBP in the Senate dining room, and verbally smacked TBP in the face over the Swiftboaters.
I wrote and congratulated him. You might think about doing the same.
For the full story on natural gas extraction and America's sacrifice zones, don't miss the new documentary Split Estate, premiering tomorrow in LA at DocuWeeks 2009:
http://www.ecohearth.com/eco-blogs/small-earth/810-rogue-corporations-and-the-split-estate.html
You harmed our country via your malicious swiftboating fictions. And now you want to be taken seriously?
T. Boone Pickens; I love you.
Why do you hate America?
Great project, Mr. Pickens but it will take decades to develope. For now, how about bringing your inflence to bear on auto makers to redesign their TRANSMISSIONS. Gear ratio can double or even tripple gas millage. Just think - Who needs to peal out and burn rubber at every turn in the 21st century. Good solutions are simple soluions.
Altenate fuel is a great idea but SLOW to come about. How about you bringing your influence to bear on auto makers first - like redesigning the TRANSMISSION that can double or tripple gas mileage. Who needs to peal 'out and burn rubber at ever turn. Your Altrnate fuel can come later, don' you think .
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