This week’s cartoon draws inspiration from a true American legend — T. Boone Pickens.

You may wonder why the eco-friendly WoodChips admire and endorse this Texas oil man and energy investor. They do so because  T. Boone has turned green, pale green as he describes it, but green in a way that makes total energy sense for our future.  He’s promoting wind power and natural gas as a way to end our dependence on foreign oil.

And he puts his money where his mouth is to the tune of billions of dollars by creating wind farms of 300 windmills up around Canada and Minnesota.  We suggest Washington D.C. as a more productive deployment, and having said that, I claim that this is the first sentence ever written in the history of the world that had Washington D. C. and productive in the same sentence. But we’ll defer to T. Boone because this deployment alone will generate the clean energy equivalent of about half of a nuclear reactor.

The windmill project was actually scaled back from 687 windmills because the price of natural gas, his second sensible endorsement, has gotten even cheaper.  That price reduction is good news for us, coupled with the fact that America has become the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.  We’re literally swimming in the stuff.

And T. Boone thinks we can cut our foreign oil dependence in half by converting diesel tractor trailer trucks to run on it.  Better yet, it doesn’t take a huge filling station infrastructure build to make this happen.  Any major interstate crossing the United States would only require about ten service stations to carry natural gas to service the truckers.

He has this plan all laid out in The Pickens Plan.  If you’re curious or want to support it you can visit his site here to check it out.  You’ll have to sign in, but won’t need to do anything else after that if you’re not inclined.  You’ll find that T. Boone talks straight and plain, which is a breath of fresh air in a subject clouded with fuzzy thinking and hidden agendas.

He is also seen frequently on CNBC’s Squawk Box show in the morning with hosts Becky Quick, Carl Quintanilla and Joe Kernen.  For those interested, I watch this financial news show every morning and recommend it.”  See Squawk Box.

So let’s hear it for T. Boone Pickens, an American hero in an era where heroes are getting pretty scarce.  As of this posting, we have inducted T. Boone into the Honorary WoodChips page.

Back to the “plain speaking” thing and our parting comment, T. Boone says folks should, “work eight hours and sleep eight hours, and make sure it isn’t the same eight hours.”

Now there’s some “woods” to live by.

Have a nice day – J. Daniel – WoodChipMeister