Those familiar with T. Boone Pickens' history will not be surprised to learn that no one is better positioned to benefit from the Pickens Plan than Pickens. His Mesa Power happens to be building the largest wind farm in the world in the Texas panhandle, with as many as 2,000 turbines. It will produce the equivalent of four large coal-fired plants and double the entire wind energy output in the country. He will soon own the majority of the wind power market. ...The billionaire says he doesn't need the money. That's obvious, but it's not the same thing as saying he's not doing it for the money.

What would possess one of America's most prominent environmentalists to praise one of America's most notorious oilmen who, in addition to his sin of making money off the production of fossil fuels, happens to be a longtime Republican activist?

But here we have Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, saying, "To put it plainly, T. Boone Pickens is out to save America."

How's that again?

That would be the same self-made billionaire T. Boone Pickens who is chairman of BP Capital Management, the hedge fund that earned him most of his fortune through hostile takeover attempts. The moves drove up stock prices of the targeted corporations -- mostly large oil companies -- which Pickens then cashed in at a handsome profit when the companies succeeded in blocking the buyouts.

So something's fishy when the left is singing the praises of T. Boone Pickens. And something's even fishier when T. Boone Pickens does something to win those plaudits.

What he has done is develop the Pickens Plan, a scheme to replace natural gas electric plants with wind farms to free up the nation's natural gas supply, and then replace gas- and diesel-burning vehicles with cleaner burning natural gas vehicles.

He says the U.S. has reached peak oil production and we now import 70 percent of our oil at a cost of $700 billion annually. Speaking of America's growing dependence on foreign oil, Pickens repeats the mantra of Barack Obama and Harry Reid: "This is one emergency we can't drill our way out of."

Won't, not can't -- but that's another matter.

Pickens simply bypasses the politics of domestic drilling by leaving it out of his equation. But the Pickens Plan would change the landscape of middle America, with wind farms stretching along a corridor from Texas to North Dakota to supply 20 percent of the electricity for the United States.

In addition, shifting natural gas power plants to wind turbines would free up natural gas for vehicles, which burn cleaner than gasoline. He says the U.S. produces 98 percent of its own natural gas. Pointing to other countries where natural gas-powered vehicles are common, Pickens says nothing stands in the way of Americans making the switch. Naturally, he wants Congress to mandate the changes.

But the plan would be prohibitively expensive and unreliable. Construction of the estimated 300,000 wind turbines, each standing more than 400 feet high, that would be needed to replace all the gas-fired plants would, by Pickens' own estimates, cost $1 trillion, with another $200 billion to build the transit infrastructure. Wind turbines are notoriously undependable, operating only eight hours a day. During peak daytime hours in summer when air conditioners drive up electric demand, wind is often nonexistent. And one analyst estimated that the turbines would require five to 10 times as much steel and concrete as traditional -- and reliable -- coal and nuclear power plants to produce the same amount of electricity.

Those familiar with T. Boone Pickens' history will not be surprised to learn that no one is better positioned to benefit from the Pickens Plan than Pickens. His Mesa Power happens to be building the largest wind farm in the world in the Texas panhandle, with as many as 2,000 turbines. It will produce the equivalent of four large coal-fired plants and double the entire wind energy output in the country. He will soon own the majority of the wind power market.

And Pickens already controls the natural gas vehicle fueling market. He owns Clean Energy, a company that owns and operates natural gas fueling stations stretching from Mexico to Canada.

T. Boone Pickens will take part in an energy summit in Las Vegas next month alongside his new friends on the left, Harry Reid and Bill Clinton, as they search for ways to placate the environmental lobby by reducing America's dependence on foreign oil without increasing domestic oil production.

The billionaire says he doesn't need the money. That's obvious, but it's not the same thing as saying he's not doing it for the money. After he earned his first million, did he really need the next 3 billion?

There's nothing wrong with making a lot of money, even if you already have a lot of money. This is, after all, the United States. But we shouldn't be so gullible as to believe, as the Sierra Club apparently does, that T. Boone Pickens is doing it to save America.

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