EcoGeek reports that T Boone Pickens' wind power project has been abandoned - Pickens Walks Away from World's Largest Wind Farm.

After months of delays due to financing difficulties, T. Boone Pickens is walking away from a plan to build the world's largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle. While money played a large part in the decision, the nail in the coffin came from an announcement that $5 million worth of new transmission lines for wind energy in Texas were not going to be built anywhere near the planned site of the wind farm.

Pickens originally planned to build his own transmission lines as well, but tough economic times have scaled back his ambition.

The good news is that Pickens and his team still plan to develop smaller wind farms around the Midwest, including spots in Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Kansas, and Texas.

While Pickens is an unlikely eco-hero, we've been rooting for him to get these big projects up and running. We can only hope that these setbacks aren't permanent and we'll see the return of his large-scale wind energy plans in the near future.

The Texas Monthly is wondering what happened to the "much hyped" Pickens Plan - Gone With the Wind. While I think the CNG powered cars part of the plan was misguided and doomed to fail, the setback to further expanding the Texas grid and wind power capacity is very unfortunate (via Energy Bulletin).

Remember T. Boone Pickens? In September, I wrote a flattering cover story (“There Will Be Boone”) on the Dallas billionaire and his plan to break America’s dependence off foreign oil. Basically, I gushed—and gushed.

Actually, back then, just about everyone in the media was gushing over Boone. With his newly published memoir and his $65 million advertising campaign to promote wind energy and natural-gas fueled automobiles, he was a genuine media sensation. On top of that, his energy-oriented hedge fund was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, leading some Wall Street experts to call him a financial genius. At the age of eighty, he was on top of his game.

Uh-oh. Since my article was published, Boone has been taking a shellacking. To begin with, he has taken a huge financial hit as the price of oil has collapsed. Since its peak in June, Pickens’s hedge fund has lost $2 billion, about sixty percent of its value, leading half of the fund’s investors to withdraw their money. (Now the fund has an estimated $400 million to $500 million left—a paltry number by Pickens standards.)

And remember that record-setting $165 million gift he made to his alma mater, Oklahoma State University, a couple of years ago—which he then had the university invest into his hedge fund so that he could grow it even more? The rumors are that much, if not all, of the OSU fund has vanished with the stock market collapse.

Yikes. Some of the Wall Street experts who once praised Boone as a wizard now say Boone has lost his credibility because he foolishly remained too bullish on oil, even as the market continued to slide.

But that’s not all. When I first wrote about the Pickens Plan, as it is now known, he was putting his money where his mouth was, declaring that he was going to build a giant 2,700-turbine wind farm in West Texas costing upward of $10 billion. Nope, not anymore. The nation’s credit crunch has gutted the wind project’s financing, putting the whole project on hold. He’s also delayed work on a state permit to build 170 miles of transmission lines from West Texas that would carry enough wind energy to power 300,000 homes. “For now,” Boone told one reporter, “the wind stuff is deader than hell.”

In fact, the whole Pickens Plan seems to be going, well, nowhere. In November, California voters resoundingly defeated a ballot measure he supported to put $5 billion in bond money into promoting natural-gas vehicles in the Golden State. (Pickens’s own company, Clean Energy Fuels Corp., the country’s largest owner of natural-gas filling stations, sponsored the plan and put up $19 million to back it.) What’s more, automakers have simply refused to embrace the idea of natural gas-powered cars. They are focused on building cars that run on electric power.

Grist has a report on the bemused T Boone Pickens, who can't comprehend the manic obsession conservatives have with drilling for oil as the one and only approach to energy policy while rejecting wind power out of hand - Grim Pickens. For some reason voting for the Democrats is still out of the question though, even if the alternative is a crazed pack of neanderthals who don't understand the phrase "finite oil supply".

Lobbying for his plan to sharply ramp up renewables, the billionaire oilman has been brought face to face with the Big Energy Lie -- the absurd notion that either John McCain or the Republicans in Congress actually believe in an "all of the above" energy policy.

In my interview with Pickens last month, he was able to offer only the blandest reply to a question pointing out that Dems back renewables but the GOP doesn't: "So let me ask you, how do we, how do we get Republicans to support that kind of investment in renewables?" See his rambling answer here.

Think Progress reports on a sadder but wiser (and far more cogent) Pickens at the National Press Club yesterday:

Q: You told The New York Times last month that you'd never vote for a Democrat. Are you finding that difficult in reaching out to Democrats then with your plan? [...]

Pickens: So I am having no problem working with the Democrats. Having a little problem working with the Republicans. They don't like it because I want to do more than just drill. And they, somehow have gotten it, a lot of them have, that you can drill your way out of this. But you can't do it. There's not enough oil there to do it.

...
Assuming Republicans (including John McCain) continue blocking an intelligent energy policy -- and blocking a vital climate policy, for that matter -- this may well be our new mantra, the mantra of self-destruction:

They don't like it because I want to do more than just drill.

Still, you can't really feel too sorry for the billionaire über-conservative oil man who helped get Bush re-elected by funding of the Swift boat ads, who supports John McCain now, and who dumbed down his own message on drilling, presumably after pushback from his Big Oil buddies -- see his "Drill, drill, drill" ad.

Again, if you back McCain and the GOP, then you must want energy policies that will leave this country forever crippled economically, forever vulnerable to the whims of the oil-producing nations like Russia, Venezuela, and the Persian Gulf states.

Every election season, commentators trot out the old statistics about how more education makes people more likely to support Democrats, more studies are published on how liberal Daily Show viewers are so well-informed, and various smart people try to explain why anyone would ever vote for a Republican, against their "self-interest." This month has seen three alarming and remarkable scientific investigations into Americans' inexplicable habit of voting for George Bush and John McCain. Which means: trend! Hooray! Let's take a look at what America's top scienticians say about [these Republican] losers and their stupid voting: ...

Conservatives Refuse to Believe "Facts"

The most upsetting and alarming research? Probably Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler's backfire effect study. In that, the political scientists took two groups of volunteers and gave them the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq was a threat and had weapons of mass destruction.

One group was given a refutation — the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

This "backfire" effect only worked on conservatives. Even when they varied the source of the refutations, it made no difference—corrections from the New York Times and Fox News both caused conservatives to believe the lies even harder. In other words, objective truth is dead, observable reality is a fairy tale, etc.

Conservatives Have An Entirely Different Moral Code

This should bring you down, a little bit. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, wrote a lengthy anthropological investigation into why people vote for Republicans. It's not the Thomas Frank "they are distracted by bullshit" explanation, though it is related: they have different cultural standards of ethics and morality! Liberals and college students define morality as "how we treat each other," conservatives attach more significance to "supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way." Liberals recognize fairness and care as important moral virtues, conservatives add to that loyalty, respect for authority, and duty. The educated moral relativism worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the way like 50% of America thinks, and stereotypes about out-of-touch elitist coastal democrats are basically correct. Sigh.

So What Have We Learned?

Conservatives respond instinctually, not rationally, to scary images, "facts," and institutions. Whether this is innate and biological or cultural seems still up in the air. Democrats can't win with logical arguments or even appeals to the innate rightness of concepts like "diversity" and "tolerance," because those aren't considered essentially good and important by the voters they're trying to appeal to. This does suggest that an appeal to old New Deal institutional concepts like the Welfare State might actually be effective, if they're wrapped in the flag and a sense of duty. Also scientists still consider the majority of Americans to be like a fascinating exotic backwards tribe and the ... country is doomed.

Cryptogon is pointing to a British report on Russian objections to NATO providing military assistance to Georgia, noting a comment from a Russian Colonel about the recent action being practice for an attack on Iran - Russia to NATO: Military Help for Georgia Is a ‘Declaration of War’. Given the outcome of that one I'm not sure the Iranians have much to worry about (unless the purpose was to get troops on the ground on Iran's northern border).

Moscow has issued an extraordinary warning to the West that military assistance to Georgia for use against South Ossetia or Abkhazia would be viewed as a “declaration of war” by Russia.

The extreme rhetoric from the Kremlin’s envoy to NATO came as President Dmitry Medvedev stressed he will make a military response to US missile defence installations in eastern Europe, sending new shudders across countries whose people were once blighted by the Iron Curtain. And Moscow also emphasised it was closely monitoring what it claims is a build-up of NATO firepower in the Black Sea. …

Top military figure Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, president of the Academy of Geopolitical Studies in Moscow, alleged that the US and NATO had been arming Georgia as a dress rehearsal for a future military operation in Iran.

“We are close to a serious conflict - U.S. and NATO preparations on a strategic scale are ongoing. In the operation the West conducted on Georgian soil against Russia - South Ossetians were the victims or hostages of it - we can see a rehearsal for an attack on Iran.”

He claimed Washington was fine tuning a new type of warfare and that the threat of an attack on Iran was growing by the day bringing “chaos and instability” in its wake.

Roberts County is a neat square in a remote corner of the Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling hills, tall grass, oak trees, mesquite, and cattle. It has a desolate beauty, a striking sparseness. The county encompasses 924 square miles and is home to fewer than 900 people. One of them is T. Boone Pickens, the oilman and corporate raider, who first bought some property here in 1971 to hunt quail. He’s now the largest landowner in the county: His Mesa Vista ranch sprawls across some 68,000 acres. Pickens has also bought up the rights to a considerable amount of water that lies below this part of the High Plains in a vast aquifer that came into existence millions of years ago.

If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property. The electricity generated by an enormous wind farm he is setting up in the Panhandle would also flow along that corridor. As far as Pickens is concerned, he could be selling wind, water, natural gas, or uranium; it’s all a matter of supply and demand. “There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That’s the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing,” he says.

In the coming decades, as growing numbers of people live in urban areas and climate change makes some regions much more prone to drought, water—or what many are calling “blue gold”—will become an increasingly scarce resource. By 2030 nearly half of the world’s population will inhabit areas with severe water stress, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. Pickens understands that. And while Texas is unusually lax in its laws about pumping groundwater, the rush to control water resources is gathering speed around the planet. In Australia, now in the sixth year of a drought, brokers in urban areas are buying up water rights from farmers. Rural residents around the U.S. are trying to sell their land (and water) to multi- national water bottlers like Nestlé (BW—Apr. 14). Companies that use large quantities of the precious resource to run their businesses are seeking to lock up water supplies. One is Royal Dutch Shell, which is buying groundwater rights in Colorado as it prepares to drill for oil in the shale deposits there.

Into this environment comes Pickens, who made a good living for a long time extracting oil and gas and now, at 80, believes the era of fossil fuel is over. So far he has spent $100 million and eight years on his project and still has not found any city in Texas willing to buy his water. But like many others, Pickens believes there’s a fortune to be made in slaking the thirst of a rapidly growing population. If he pumps as much as he can, he could sell about $165 million worth of water to Dallas each year. “The idea that water can be sold for private gain is still considered unconscionable by many,” says James M. Olson, one of America’s preeminent attorneys specializing in water- and land-use law. “But the scarcity of water and the extraordinary profits that can be made may overwhelm ordinary public sensibilities.”

T Boone Pickens is increasing his lobbying for the US to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, launching a new initiative called "Pickens' Plan".

America is in a hole and it's getting deeper every day. We import 70% of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year - four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.

I've been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.

On January 20, 2009, a new President gets sworn in. If we're organized, we can convince Congress to make major changes towards cleaner, cheaper and domestic energy resources.

To get this done, I need your help. Check out the plan. If you think it's worth fighting for, please join our effort.

The Guardian has a report on the Texas oilman's conversion to wind power in his home state, building a 4 GW wind farm - Big oil to big wind: Texas veteran sets up $10bn clean energy project (via TreeHugger).

T Boone Pickens is famous for thinking big. He founded his Texan oil company, Mesa Petroleum, in 1956 with just $2,500 (£1,200) in the bank. After a string of audacious takeovers he turned it into an independent empire that challenged the big oil companies, and today he is worth $3bn.

Now this straight-talking Southerner is launching the biggest and most audacious project of his career. This month he will make the first down payment on 500 wind turbines at a cost of $2m each. The order is the first material step towards his goal of building the world's largest wind farm.

Over the next four years he intends to erect 2,700 turbines across 200,000 acres of the Texan panhandle. The scheme is five times bigger than the world's current record-holding wind farm and when finished will supply 4,000 megawatts of electricity - enough to power about one million homes.

It's not just the breathtaking scale of the scheme that is striking, though at a total cost of $10bn it impresses even Pickens himself: "It's pretty mind boggling," he says. The fact that Pickens, a tycoon who made his fortune in oil, has turned his attention to wind power is an indication of how the tectonic plates are moving. Until recently wind was seen as marginal and alternative; now it is being eyed by Wall Street.

"Don't get the idea that I've turned green," Pickens tells the Guardian in the Dallas offices of his new venture Mesa Power. "My business is making money, and I think this is going to make a lot of money."

The three largest wind farms in America are all situated in the surrounding area, Nolan county, which, with a population of just 18,000, now produces more wind power than the UK, France and California. ...

Back in Dallas, Pickens believes there are several reasons to invest in this new energy source. Beyond the mere profit motive, which clearly excites him, there is the fact that Texan oil has been on the wane since it peaked at 10m barrels a day in 1973, and is already down to half that amount. "Oil fields have a declining curve - you find one, it peaks and starts downhill, you've got to find another one to replace it. It drives you crazy! With wind, there's no decline."

There is also a political edge to his obsession. Politics and Pickens go together, as is obvious from the walls of his offices, lined with photographs of him with world leaders. One shows him with the Queen, Prince Philip and George HW Bush; another is with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan; a third shows him on board Air Force One with the current President Bush. There is a signed calendar from Arnold Schwarzenegger on the table.

As the pictures suggest, Pickens has for many years been a major financial backer of both George Bushes, but he professes to be frustrated by the lack of action on energy by this administration and all its predecessors. "George Bush has done nothing. Nothing. Every guy that ran for president clear back to Nixon said he would make us energy independent, but not one goddamned thing has been done. Zero. The biggest problem facing the United States in the next 50 years is energy and nobody has come up with a solution."

Pickens, being Pickens, has come up with a solution - and it makes his own gargantuan plans for a wind farm in the panhandle look tiny. For the benefit of the Guardian, he draws on a white board his master scheme. He carves out an enormous corridor of land running north to south through the middle of the US - along the great plains - where he would build an army of wind farms. Then he draws an equally enormous corridor running east to west from Texas to southern California which he would similarly dedicate to solar energy.

"You need a giant plan for America. Not the pissant 83 megawatt [windfarm] deals being stamped all over the country. There needs to be a huge plan from someone with leadership. It's going to take years to do, but it has to start now." Only then, he explains, can the US stop what he regards as the madness of a flood of money flowing out of America to the oil producers of the Middle East. "That money is going God knows where - a few friends, a lot of enemies. We've got to stop it."