Gone With the Wind 
The Last Pickens Show 
There Will Be Boone
The most famous wildcatter in Texas history is spending $58 million of his own money to promote the Pickens Plan, which proposes massive wind farms (which he’s already building), more reliance on natural gas (which he has a huge stake in), and ways to combat global warming (which loyal Republicans aren’t supposed to believe is real) to break America’s addiction to foreign oil. But does the 80-year-old have the energy to save the world?
Garry says: I am dissappointed that you have not included the wonderful pictures of T. Boone, his wife, and the lovely interior shots of his home. I am visiting friends out-of-state and was bragging on your magazine. I pulled up your website hoping to show my aunt the pictures, but was somewhat dumbfounded that the online article didn't include all of the photos. Why? It seems such a shame not to enhance the online article when you already have the photos. (December 10th, 2008 at 10:27am)
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Standing at a podium at the Pampa civic center, Boone fiddled for a while with his lapel microphone and then said, “Are y’all hearing a damn thing I’m saying?” Everyone roared with laughter. He then announced that he had just written a check for about $150 million as his down payment to purchase his first 667 wind turbines, each the size of a 48-story building. He openly admitted that none of the wind turbines would be placed on his nearby ranch “because I think they’re ugly as hell. But any of you who wants to put one on your ranch will get about ten to twenty thousand dollars a year in royalties from us. Pampa is on its way to becoming the wind capital of the world!” Everyone applauded until their hands were sore.
Afterward, people gathered around him, saying things like, “We sure do appreciate you, Boone. We do, we do.” One older man walked up to remind him about their years playing high school basketball together. Boone not only remembered the man’s name, but he also remembered the names of everyone on the team. An immigrant from India who owns a Pampa motel asked Boone whether he should build a second one to prepare for the 1,500 or so workers who would be arriving to construct the turbines, and a woman said she was worried she wouldn’t be able to irrigate her crops with a wind turbine “stuck smack-dab” in the middle of her field. Boone grabbed a sheet of paper and sketched out a diagram showing how the irrigation would work. “Okay, we’ve solved it,” Boone said to her. “Now, go sign my lease. We’re going to make you some money, and we’re going to make me some money too.”
Boone’s critics—and there are plenty of them—say that such a statement only indicates Boone’s ultimate motive for his various projects: to make himself even richer. Some residents in the Panhandle are livid about his plan to send their water to Dallas, claiming that he will inevitably drain the valuable Ogallala Aquifer. (Boone’s experts insist that the aquifer will not be harmed.) Others are hopping mad that his lobbyists slipped an amendment on a water bill through the state legislature that gives him the power of eminent domain to obtain the right-of-way through private property to build a 328-mile water pipeline and electric transmission lines from the Panhandle to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
And there are skeptics who believe the Pickens Plan is nothing more than a scheme to benefit his own wind farm and natural gas company—“his way of filling his own pocketbook,” snapped Thomas “Smitty” Smith, the director of Texas operations for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. At the press conference in New York, an Associated Press reporter asked Boone, “Is this not a conflict of interest? Let’s say there’s an arms manufacturer announcing that America is facing a serious war and that the only answer is to buy his weapons. Would you really trust what he’s saying?”
Boone didn’t hesitate. “Sure, I’d like to make a profit on the wind farm, but do you really think I’m doing this because I need more money?” he said. “In the next ten years, this country is going to need a fifteen percent increase in the amount of energy that we use now, and do we really want it to come from foreign oil? Do we really want to just sit here and keep doing nothing? I want people to look at me and say, ‘That old fart, he’s eighty years old, he’s out there still plugging, putting those wind turbines up at his age, and if he can do it, I can do it too.’”
Experts are still not convinced wind energy can become a major source of electricity for the United States. So far, wind supplies about 1 percent of the country’s power. To build enough turbines to get wind power to 20 percent would cost at least $1 trillion over the next twenty years (one expert puts the cost at $14 trillion). Not only would the federal government have to provide significant tax breaks to the builders of wind farms to make them economically viable compared with the cost of producing fossil fuels, but it would also have to fund a nationwide network of transmission lines to get the power from the Wind Belt to the East and West coasts. The price tag? An estimated $70 billion. And there’s always this question: What would happen to our nation’s power grid on one of those days when the wind does not blow?
Furthermore, powering vehicles with compressed or liquefied natural gas, which has been a pet project of Boone’s since the late eighties, has been slow to catch on. For one thing, few passenger cars are being built by U.S. automakers for natural gas use. And while inexpensive equipment has been created that would allow the owners of natural gas cars to fill up at home, plugging into their own natural gas lines, they’re still limited by where they can drive because there are only a handful of natural gas filling stations around the country.
When I threw these various criticisms at Boone, he just shrugged. He said the cost for tax breaks for wind farms is minimal, given that we spend $700 billion a year on foreign oil. He also said that as long as other domestic energy sources are being developed, including solar and nuclear power, the nation would have plenty of energy for those days when the wind was not blowing. As for the natural gas part of his plan, he argued that if Congress simply provides modest tax breaks for fuel retailers to invest in natural gas pumps at their stations and for automakers to build more natural gas cars, consumers will readily give up their gas-guzzling automobiles. “Do you realize that if you could fill up your natural gas car at your home right now, it would cost you only $1.50 a gallon?” Boone told me. “Who’s going to walk away from that?”
Since the rollout of Boone’s advertising campaign, the presidential candidates have been talking more about energy. Perhaps coincidentally—or perhaps not—McCain quoted Boone almost word for word in late July when he told one audience about the outrage of America’s spending $700 billion a year on foreign oil. Obama mentioned Boone by name in early August, when he told an audience in Michigan, “Even Texas oilman Boone Pickens has said . . . ‘This is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.’”
When the advertising campaign ends later this fall, Boone plans to spend more of his millions on a major lobbying effort to get these various tax incentives passed in Washington—“hopefully within ten days after the new president is sworn in,” he said.
“Are you kidding?” I asked, incredulous. “Ten days?”
“Man, I’ve got to move fast,” he said. “I’m headed into my ninth decade. At my age, I don’t have time to plant small trees.”
Although Boone likes to tell people that a doctor told him he has the arteries of a 54-year-old—“He says the good news is that I could live to be 114,” he often jokes, “but the bad news is that I won’t be able to see or hear”—he knows there’s a chance he won’t be alive to see his Pickens Plan come to fruition. “You can tell he senses the compression of time,” said Stillwell. “It’s not that he’s afraid of the idea of death. He’s challenged by it. He wants to get more accomplished before his time comes than anyone can imagine.”
Indeed, everyone who knows him says he’s working harder now than he ever did during his takeover years. Madeleine told me that Boone refuses to take any kind of vacation except for weekends to the ranch or to her California home. “And even then he’s always on the phone. Once, I suggested that we go on an African safari. He said, ‘Honey, let’s go down to the zoo to see some animals, and we can be done in an hour.’” He did take a two-week trip to China to look at business prospects. “I swear, within seventeen hours, he was asking me when we could head back,” said Rosser, his public relations chief.
Boone certainly doesn’t plan on checking out anytime soon. When Rosser suggested they name his new book “Life in the Fourth Quarter,” Boone snapped, “I’m not in any fourth quarter.” He also just put his name down on the waiting list to get the newest Gulfstream G660 jet, despite being told the wait will be about ten years. And one night while I was having dinner with Boone, Madeleine, and some of his associates at a restaurant in New York (everyone ordered steak except for Madeleine, who was eating what looked like a head of lettuce), a man leaned over and told me that if the Ford Motor Company ever goes bankrupt, as was being rumored that very week on Wall Street, he was going to try to persuade Boone to buy the automaker and turn all its cars into natural gas-powered vehicles. “I think he’d do it,” the man said. “Boone always loves a challenge.”
Boone hadn’t been able to hear everything the man said, but he did hear the word “challenge.”
“What’s that?” he said. “I like a challenge?” He looked around the table. “Now, that’s the damn truth.”
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