Oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is being disingenuous, telling one thing to the American people and another to Congress.

He has repeatedly said that no government help is needed to pursue his plan to build the world's largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle. Yet he is lobbying hard for extension of the Production Tax Credit and National Renewable Energy Zones -- essentially a huge tax shelter for wind industry investors and expedited eminent domain for transmission corridors.

The real innovation here is the well-coordinated manipulation of public perception. The Pickens media campaign focuses on independence from foreign oil, and he is just one among many who have tried to convince the public and policymakers that there is a connection between wind-generated electricity and oil, which is hardly used for electricity.

The nation has seemingly not reached the point where we can look at this issue in a rational manner. Real analysis, however, makes it clear that commercial wind energy is but a small part of the solution to our energy problems and, moreover, it makes far less sense in some areas than in others.

Pickens advocates development of what he calls "the" wind corridor, the swath of open country from Texas to the Dakotas. The push here in the East is for wind development on forested Appalachian mountain ridges. The Appalachian wind corridor may be a first-rate tax shelter, but it's definitely not a first-rate energy resource. It comes in a distant third behind both the Texas-to-Dakotas corridor and the Atlantic offshore corridor. It's a loser in terms of energy benefits and environmental trade-offs.

The Pickens argument for freeing up natural gas for transportation, and thereby reducing U.S. demand for oil, depends on a tenuous string of assumptions and propositions. He assumes that wind power, although intermittent and unreliable, will be available somewhere in large supply all of the time.

His answer is to build enough turbines over a wide enough geographic area -- hundreds of thousands of turbines over a thousand miles of latitude -- and to build the vast array of new transmission lines required to get the electricity where it's needed. In the meantime, until this fantastic investment and landscape transformation takes place, the Pickens plan will introduce unprecedented variability into the generation side of our national electricity system.

I predict that the Pickens plan will backfire. It will run up demand for natural gas as a fuel source for the new levels of rapidly dispatchable generation that will be needed to maintain the electricity system in a manageable state of balance.

The National Research Council released a report to Congress in 2007 based on what was then considered the most ambitious, yet still reasonable, estimate for growth in the wind industry. It was estimated that by 2020, the U.S. would have the equivalent of 36,000 wind turbines providing 4.5 percent of our electricity supply, not the 20 percent now promoted.

Even at 4.5 percent the predicted environmental costs are stunning. In the Appalachian region, where I focus my research, this scale of development will require extensive industrialization of our mountain ridges. In other words, the trade-off involves much of our remaining wild landscape.

Indiscriminate national investment in commercial wind energy will involve a huge commitment of public resources and the neglect of serious responses to serious problems. The public will get smart about this before long, but perhaps not before real damage has been done and real opportunities are lost.

We do need solutions for our energy problems. For now, though, most of the political traction is going to those who propose implausible solutions that stand to make them a lot of money. The concept of green energy is at risk of losing currency.

Rick Webb is a senior scientist with the University of Virginia's Department of Environmental Sciences. His Web site, www.VaWind.org, addresses environmental issues associated with commercial wind energy development.