One of these words is not like the others. But then again, T. Boone Pickens isn't like the others either. Today, Stephen Marche examines a typical quote from a delightfully atypical enviro-crusader.

The general rule, that everything before the but is bullshit, does not apply in the case of T. Boone Pickens, the ex-wildcatter and current hedge-fund manager from Texas. Pickens' is the latest, and perhaps strangest, voice calling for a radical change in America's relationship with the environment. He has decided to spend $58-million of his own money on an ad campaign to promote a new American energy policy -- one which would involve massive subsidies to himself as well huge gains for the clean energy industry. He believes that the United States can generate 22% of its energy from wind and solar power, which will free up 22% of natural gas reserves (much cleaner than crude and relatively plentiful in America) to service a newly engineered fleet of American cars which could run on natural gas, thereby freeing America from its dependence on foreign oil. Simple.

Pickens looks and talks like an oilman. His limpid and luxurious Texas drawl is not the shrill sound of the typical environmentalist. Aesthetically, though not politically, he is the opposite of Al Gore, who recently "challenged" the nation to produce 100% of its energy from renewable sources within 10 years, a goal which even his supporters described as "superstretched." Nonetheless, Gore and Pickens have little but good to say about each other, which is remarkable considering that Pickens was a major sponsor of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign [Bravo Sierra, the Swifties told the truth about Kerry's lies and now you see Mr. Marche's leftie bias coming out]. He continues to support the Swift-Boaters, posting a standing offer of $1-million to anyone who can prove a single untruth in any of the nine anti-Kerry commercials he paid for. T. Boone Pickens is a fundamental Republican, and yet Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, describes Pickens as "my political friend." The emphasis, one assumes, is on the word "political."

Pickens represents a new brand of environmentalism -- conservative [no, he's just another liberal, Mr. Marche] but not pretending. He believes that the $700-billion the U. S. spends on foreign oil is a "national security crisis." Offshore drilling in Alaska is fine by him--one has the feeling that he wouldn't mind grinding up the caribou herds himself if their bodies contained any crude [rubbish, Mr. Marche]. He speaks the language of national, business and personal interest, not the language of organic wholeness, of harmony with nature, which has so dominated the environmental movement from its origins to today.

Pickens is new, and so important, because his vision of the future of the environment is not focused on life, or living things, but on money, his own and others. And the future of our money matters more to us than the future of life on the planet. This is one of the most disturbing lessons of our current situation, but it's also evident in every page of our history: our selfishness and greed are basic to us, older than original sin. In Genesis, God gives us "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the Earth" before he even gives us names. The cruelty and self-destruction we are willing to inflict for dominion fills our history, ancient and modern. So it should come as no surprise that environmentalism as a form of idealism has been ineffective -- Al Gore calls us to take up our duties towards the future in the same way the greatest generation took on the Great War. But we aren't great. We know that. We are hyper-conscious of the imminent collapses of the natural world and yet have altered our behaviour only in miniscule, practically irrelevant way. [Oh, please.  Not more of theis environmentalist whining!]  Pickens' big idea is to change the ethos of the environmentalist project: Let's do this not because we're good people but because we're good businessmen. That proposal has a shot.

I would never bet against T. Boone Pickens. Nor should you. He spent a little less than $6-million on the Swift Boat Veterans and he got his money's worth. [The Swifties (combat veterans all) told the truth on a lying John F. Kerry.  What's your point, Mr. Marche?] He's spending $58-million on promoting his new plan, deliberately choosing not to fund either presidential candidate for the duration of their campaigns. [At least Mr. Pickens is spending his own money, Mr. Marche and not taxpayer's money.]  Potentially, his advocacy is the beginning of a massive shift in public consciousness about the environment, a move away from its status as a left-wing issue [not bloody likely, Mr. Marche]. Subsumption into the mainstream could be either a huge step forward or a huge step back for the environmental movement. Pickens doesn't deny the existence of global warming [he should because it's Bravo Sierra writ large], and his folksy but disdainful sneer for those who do deny it -- "I can see what's happening to the glaciers … It doesn't take a genius" -- will convince a certain portion of the American public more than any number of Nobel-Prize winning scientists at the United Nations [who have cooked every fact there is using flawed climate change models to get other people's money for funding and would say anything to continue getting that money] ever could [so why has a Nobel winning mathematician in the UK completely debunked with equations the climate change models used by the Global Warming crowd as based on bad data.  Global temps have declined for the last 7 years and not increased as predicted by the models.  The 2007-2008 winter wiped out all the "global warming" gain since the start of the 20th century.  T. Boone Pickens isn't listening]. More importantly, he believes that there are rational courses of action open to us involving capitalism and national interest, rather than utopian visions of whole countries or groups of countries deciding to do the right thing. That's the spiritual deal he is presenting to the environmental movement: They must sacrifice virtue for effectiveness. The speed with which they have taken him up on the offer shows how desperate they are, how precarious they believe the Earth's position to be. Even Al Gore tires of virtue eventually.

Mr. Marche makes some interesting points, but gets bogged down in his leftist "truths" and spoils what could have been a good article.  Comments are mine for the more egregious statements.  MG