Earlier this week, I commented on oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens launching an effort to promote wind energy development and natural gas as a transportation fuel. At the time, I did not realize the magnitude of the scale of his plan or the lengths to which he was willing to go to spread the message. If you've been watching television at all over the past two days you may have seen one of his commercials. He also has a fully functioning website up and running to further detail his plan. An overview of which can be seen in this video (also embedded below).
Maybe he's gone senile at the age of 80 or maybe he has a point that we can't continue to ship our wealth overseas and leave our children and grandchildren nothing but the debts of their greedy ancestors. I'm sure the "it will never work" (and especially not in my backyard) crowd will be out in full force though, just as they were when gasoline first powered the automobile.
A new source of power... called gasoline has been produced by a Boston engineer. Instead of burning the fuel under a boiler, it is exploded inside the cylinder of an engine.
The dangers are obvious. Stores of gasoline in the hands of people interested primarily in profit would constitute a fire and explosive hazard of the first rank. Horseless carriages propelled by gasoline might attain speeds of 14 or even 20 miles per hour. The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action even if the military and economic implications were not so overwhelming... [T]he cost of producing [gasoline] is far beyond the financial capacity of private industry... In addition the development of this new power may displace the use of horses, which would wreck our agriculture.
- U. S. Congressional Record, 1875.
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