Pickens is a former oil guy. He made a pile of money of a bunch of oil claims in (I think) Texas that are now drying up. His big "plan" is to have the government invest bajillions of dollars to transition the country off of oil and coal and onto natural gas and wind energy. He says it'd do all sorts of grand things for our country and our national security and for the envronment and the economy and whatever else.
Actually, all it'd do is pad his own bottom line. His oil wells may be dry, but he still has lots of natural gas. NG isn't worth much in the current gasoline-based economy, but it could be extremely valuable if we switched to running cars and trucks on NG. And he was, may still be, positioning himself bigtime into the wind industry, buying up turbine companies and wind farm leases and whatnot.
Making a major infrastructure transition of this sort is extremely difficult and expensive. That's where FedGov comes in. Pickens wants FedGov to pay for all of the transition costs.
It's a brilliant scheme, actually. Now that he doesn't have any more oil to sell, he wants everyone stop buying oil and start buying wind and NG. And once the nation has made the transition (at taxpayer expense), it'd be costly and difficult to switch away to something else. We'd be locked into his wind and NG in the same way we're all now locked into oil.
