Treehuggers step aside, saving the environment is now in the realm of bottom line huggers. I’ve been reading the Pickens Plan and it seems like billionaire oilman T. Boone is about to overshadow the combined efforts from decades of smelly hippies and eccentric pirates with a real strategy. He’s out to save America from it’s 700 billion dollar a year dependency on foreign oil, largely by taking advantage of the great plains state’s unique wind resources.

There’s something about being a billionaire that gets people to listen, perhaps the wads of cash bulging out from under his ten gallon hat. Honestly, I’ve never seen Pickens in a ten gallon hat, but It’s hard to imagine a Texas oilman in anything else. Even conservative columnist Cal Thomas is excited about his plan and it’s ability to bridige the divide between parties.

While we are a bigger fan of microgeneration than Pickens’ multi-billion dollar wind farms, we’re very excited here at Replacing Oil with the amount of attention being drawn to the botton line of alternative energy rexources in the United States. The great plains states have enough wind to churn out more power than all the oil off the shore of Florida (I really don’t have the numbers to back that up, but it sounds about right). From both economic and environmental perspectives wind farms are a very safe investment. Hopefully when Obama takes office in less than 6 months, we can quit banging our heads against the wall trying to get Washington to listen to reason.