Thursday 9 July 2009

There’s an ill wind blowing for Pickens [update 2]

Billionaire Texan investor T. Boone Pickens thought he could pick up a truckload of pork courtesy of Obama’s “Green New Dealnonsense.  He called it his “Pickens Plan.”

Pickens  planned to plant a whole swarm of wind turbines – the world’s largest wind farm – in an effort to farm the subsidies that are the only way renewable energy boondoggles can “make” money for their progenitors.

And now it seems he has a few turbines he doesn’t know what to do with.  687 at last count.  It seems more affordable forms of real energy, like natural gas, and lack of subsidies to farm (as yet) have killed off his dreams of tapping the taxpayers’ pocket to fill his own.

My heart bleeds for the bludging schmuck.

UPDATE 1: Commenting on the demise of Picken’s corrupt scheme, writer Ray Harvey writes:

Boone Pickens is [still] calling for massive subsidization of the wind-power industry. As with ethanol and recycling and a host of other issues, you must ask yourself again, if these things are so efficient, why do they need to be subsidized? Answer: they're not so efficient. Energies that require massive subsidization benefit absolutely no one; the only reason they need to be subsidized is that they cannot compete on the open market.

UPDATE 2:  And William Anderson says  R.I.P., Pickens Plan!

    The once-ballyhooed Pickens Plan is being scrapped, as it should be. The notion that we can replace coal and oil-fired energy with something as fickle as the wind is something only an environmentalist or a politician could love.
   
Central planners and their allies are forever laying out Great Plans for the Future. However, those plans always are foolish and dangerous, and "alternative energy" is no exception. If you want to understand the full extent of the real harm that environmentalism and the government central planning it spawns have done to humanity, read the articles of George Reisman.

1 comment:

StephenR said...

Update 1 seems to imply there are no current subsidies or government help for the other competing energy industries, not sure that's the case. Would explain the 'need' for wind subsidies.