Pch101

How You Can Invest in the Pickens Plan

McSpin, you miss the point.

Pickens is selling a pipe dream that the US is going to become energy independent. The US has a snowball's chance in Hades of achieving energy independence.

Energy independence cannot possibly be achieved in the United States without major lifestyle changes and reductions in commerce that Americans will simply not make, under any circumstances.

The Pickens Scam is simply a corporate welfare scheme that will produce no bang for the buck for anyone, except for Pickens and his cronies. It's a pork barrel project that appeals to our base instincts and to those who can't do a bit of research or use a spreadsheet.

How You Can Invest in the Pickens Plan

The Pickens Scam is really a joke for anyone aside from Pickens and his investors. Not because windmills are bad -- they're fine, and we could probably use a few more of them -- but because he is boldly lying when he claims that paying more for his windmills will do anything to make the US energy independent.

Even in the best case scenario, it's a drop in the bucket. It is simply impossible to generate enough wind power that it could meaningfully reduce US usage of natural gas for electricity generation and to divert that to powering motor vehicles.

Anyone who spends ten minutes with the numbers can see this. Most electricity in the US is generated from coal, and most natural gas is not used to create electricity. Even if you could reduce electricity generation from natural gas by 10% (a totally unrealistic assumption, by the way), you would only reduce demand for natural gas by about 3%. The math does not compute.

Ultimately, the Pickens Scam would make the US even **more** dependent upon imported energy, because the US lower 48 is depleting what is left.

Over time, the US is destined to import more of its gas from foreign sources, which means more money for the countries that have it, such as Russia and Iran. In other words, the usual suspects.

The Pickens Scam ultimately appeals to the greed and stupidity of the American voter, who doesn't want to accept the reality that the quickest route to using less imported energy is to consume less energy.

That means downgrading your lifestyle and figuring out how to use less energy, even if it means walking, using public transit or just staying home. Americans apparently lost their rationing gene sometime around 1945, and they are bound and determined to never, ever get it back.

(None of this is a criticism of the article, by the way. I'm watching GE, too, but I doubt that Pickens can buy enough windmills to do much for their fundamentals.)