Carol Flake Chapman

Clean Energy Trifecta: Trucks, Tweaked Engines and a Tycoon’s Natural Gas

Hi, Paul. I agree that T. Boone is in it for the long haul. His water project for Texas is even more long term than the wind farm and actually rather preposterous in its scale. Not to mention cornering the market on a resource that many think should belong to the public.

Clearly the U.S. has to be looking at energy and water in the long term as well as the short haul, and not just let the tycoons do our planning for us. But it looks as though the price of oil is not going to go down substantially, and so we're going to have to have some short-term solutions and try solutions for different niches. The cost of natural gas powered trucks is obviously not prohibitive if companies like UPS are buying more and more of them. And the ports have a serious pollution problem that has to be solved now rather than later.

The key problem, as you point out, is making sure that natural gas doesn't go the way of corn.