For spreading the gospel on clean energy, it’s hard to make friends with statements like "you don't want to turn it over to the greenies, or what'll happen is they'll want to shut down every coal plant . . . for power generation and our utility bills will go through the ceiling."

But that was T. Boone Pickens at a conference for EnergyBiz Magazine, touting his controversial plan to spend billions of dollars toward wind energy fields that would generate electricity so that cleaner burning natural gas can be freed up for Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) automobiles. Because of this revelation, he’s become strange bedfellows with Al Gore, Robert Kennedy Jr, and Carl Pope. And then there’s Pickens’ core constituency (read: oilmen!) who are angry at his clean energy proposals. And then there’s Democrats who say he is not to be trusted after years of corporate raiding, and directly funding the Swift Boat attacks that brought us an arduous four more years of climate change inaction. Politics aside, you couldn’t have picked a more opportunistic human being to carry the ball.

So “greenies” have to reconcile a tough pill. Their alternative energy savior doesn’t give a hoot about them. T. Boone never mentions climate change in his talks. Just buying and selling energy. Your dice.

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