Arabic script is about to appear
on television sets across the
United States
,
with
the
Texas
oilman T. Boone Pickens helpfully
reading an English translation.
‘‘Go back to sleep,
America
. The oil crisis is over,’’ Mr.
Pickens intones, deadpan, in the new video. Seductive Middle Eastern music
plays in the background.
But suddenly, the picture switches to
U.S.
troops on a desert battlefield as
flames leap skyward, and Mr. Pickens declares, ‘‘I don’t think so!’’ What,
exactly, is he up to now? The 81-year-old billionaire spent much of the past
two years and $62 million of his fortune on an advertising and public relations
offensive in which he tried to persuade Americans to embrace his Pickens plan. It
called for a vast expansion of wind energy to displace natural gas, freeing the
natural gas for use in vehicles, thus displacing foreign oil.
No American with a television set could escape Mr.
Pickens’s argument last year. But somehow, a mass conversion to natural-gas
cars failed to ensue.
So now Mr. Pickens is turning up the volume, and
changing his pitch with some extra alarm bells. He is opening his wallet to
spend millions more on a new campaign, with the first advertisements scheduled
to be broadcast Thursday on cable stations across the
United States
.
His aides hope that a stronger message, focused on
national security, will be effective after the attempted bombing of an airliner
Christmas Day and other terrorist actions. They say they discussed whether
using the Arabic lettering might be viewed as incendiary or offensive but
concluded that any added attention would be good for the cause.
‘‘We’re infidels with most of these people and
they have no use for us,’’Mr. Pickens said
in an interview on the way to a speech in
Dallas
recently. ‘‘We’re getting more
and more dependent on the wrong people.’’ The Pickens campaign has been
suspended since October, when Mr. Pickens decided that health care was drowning
out the energy debate. But he said he thought the energy policy would soon move
back to the top of Washington’s agenda.
This time, he has tweaked the Pickens plan in a
way that just happens to conform with his changing business interests.
The man who made much of his fortune on oil, then
in recent years turned to wind power, is now underplaying wind as a possible
solution, while continuing to promote natural gas. Some of his stakes in
companies would be more valuable if natural-gas consumption were to rise.
Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, emitting
fewer greenhouse gases than coal or oil. Many experts said they thought it was
underused as a power and transportation fuel, especially since new technologies
have unlocked huge reserves in shale gas fields across the United States.
Proponents of natural gas took a back seat when
the House of Representatives passed a climate bill last year, as lawmakers from
states that produce coal dug in to keep coal as the principal fuel for
electricity production in the United States. Natural gas may get a better
hearing in the Senate, but its prospects there are also in doubt.
Skeptics said putting in the infrastructure for
natural gas vehicles would be too expensive, and battery powered electric cars
and hybrids were a better alternative. And worries were growing that the
techniques used to blast through shale rock to release natural gas could
pollute drinking water.
‘‘It’s very hard to move mountains on energy
policy, and Pickens has not yet even moved a hill,’’ said Amy Myers Jaffe, an
energy expert at
Rice
University
in
Houston
. ‘‘The problem that Pickens faces
is that in this country if you are from the oil industry, people are naturally
suspicious of what you say on energy policy.’’ Since Mr. Pickens began his
campaign in 2008, he has been on the road for 178 days, visiting 37 states and
80 cities.
He has amassed 1.6 million signatures on a Web
site.
For the new effort, he has developed three
television commercials with a toughened emphasis on national security.
He is preparing to tour the
United States
again to inspire his ‘‘army’’ of
citizens to lobby Congress for tax incentives.
He would not disclose how much he expected to
spend on the effort this time.
In the former version of the plan, Mr.
Pickens called on
America
to build thousands of wind
turbines from
Texas
to
Canada
and install transmission lines to
deliver the new power to cities across the country.
Now, he is playing down wind because he says it
has become almost impossible to finance a wind project, largely because
low-cost natural gas has made wind power less competitive. His focus is now
almost entirely on natural gas.
He wants the president to convert the entire
automobile fleet of the
U.S.
government to natural gas. Then
he wants Congress to give large tax credits to companies that use natural-gas
vehicles and filling stations that install the necessary equipment. By Mr.
Pickens’s estimate, just fueling a small percentage of the trucks and buses in
America
with natural gas could displace
as much as 8 percent of oil imports within seven years.
‘‘All you need to do is get the oar in the
water,’’ he said. ‘‘Then you are on your way to get off OPEC oil.’’ Mr. Pickens
has not been winning many battles lately. His natural-gas fueling company spent
an estimated $3 million on an unsuccessful ballot initiative in
California
in 2008 that would have
authorized the state to borrow $5 billion to invest in natural gas and
alternative energy. Then his multibillion-dollar wind project in the
Texas
panhandle fizzled because of the
credit crisis, regulatory issues and other problems. He was forced to put the
project on hold last year.
Mr. Pickens made his fortune as a buyout artist
and raider, jostling the industry when he set his sights on companies like Gulf
Oil and Unocal. He lost about $2 billion when oil prices tanked in 2008 but is
still worth an estimated $1.2 billion.
(from
the New York Times)