Men's Journal

Terry Tamminen, the brains behind Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s groundbreaking environmental policies, says that, at a minimum, the Pickens Plan needs to be taken seriously. “It’s a little fast and loose,” he says. “I don’t think he’s laid out a blueprint in any individual state or region — how many wind machines you would need and in which parts of the country, where you would put the natural gas stations and how you would convert the cars. It’s mostly a theory. But if I’m building a house, that’s the story I tell my architect, and then my architect draws up the plan. He’s a visionary, but not the architect.”

For admirers such as Ted Turner and Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Pickens’s profit motive is not cause for skepticism but optimism: If T. Boone Pickens starts betting on alternative energy, others will likely follow. Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, argues that America’s status in the world, as well as its wealth, largely depends on our ability to wean ourselves off foreign oil. In a column last summer Friedman even said that Congress and the president should ask of Pickens, “What laws do we need to enact to foster 1,000 more like you?” Al Gore, meanwhile, took his time before weighing in on the Pickens Plan but ultimately gave it a public nod, calling it “respectable.”

To those who remain dubious, Pickens has a simple retort: “If you don’t like my plan, then I’ll ask you, What’s your plan? Because if you don’t have one, then your plan is foreign oil.”

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The following morning, I join up with Pickens and his staff aboard his private plane. For now the market’s up, but it’s early. I can see that Pickens has put a lot of responsibility in the hands of his aggressive young team. The Pickens Plan’s deputy director, Adrian Gray, at just 32, is a veteran of the last two Bush presidential runs, and later served in the administration under Karl Rove. Recent University of Virginia graduate Gretel Truong films Pickens before and after each event, capturing snippets of conversation as he meets governors, state representatives, environmentalists, and businesspeople, and posts the clips on the Pickens Plan website. Pickens also has representatives on dozens of college campuses, all of whom he checks in with regularly.

Just outside the University of Texas campus Gray is on his cell phone to another staffer, Jason Huntsberry, who’s waiting for us at the business school. “We’re about five minutes outside, you ready for us?” he asks. “How’s the crowd looking?”

“Awesome,” Huntsberry tells him.

Pickens receives a long shower of applause when he steps onstage. He begins, as he often does, with a little football, making a deal with his audience that he’ll root for Texas if they’ll root for Oklahoma State. “Unless of course we’re playing each other, at which point we’re on our own.” He quickly wins the room over, and his ease in front of crowds has me imagining his preacher grandfather. Pickens then takes a green magic marker and writes the numbers 85, 21, 5, 25, 4, 3, and 40 on his famous white board, talking over his shoulder like a high school science teacher explaining the principles of hydrogen and oxygen.

“Eighty-five million barrels of oil a day is what the world produces. We use 21 million of those, and we only produce 5 million,” he lectures. “Think about it. We’re using 25 percent of the world’s oil supply a day. But we have 4 percent of the world’s population and we only have 3 percent of the world’s oil
supply. This is a killer. We have operated for 40 years as if we have a lot of oil. But we don’t. What we do have are resources.” He writes these out: coal, nuclear, natural gas, solar, wind.

His audience takes notes and snaps pictures. As Pickens speaks he keeps a hand in his pocket and leans back on his heels, as though to take in the entire room at once. His demeanor is of a man who knows he is right and is slightly irked at anyone who doesn’t yet agree with him. When the presentation is over, Pickens begins what he calls the best part, the back-and-forth conversation with the audience. Lines form in two aisles and a microphone begins to circulate.

“Given all your natural gas holdings and your wind farms, why shouldn’t we be skeptical of your motives?” asks a woman in her 40s in a T-shirt and jeans.

“Well, I’m 80 years old, and I’ve got all the money I need. I’m not trying to get rich off this plan. I’m trying to save the country. The wind? Anyone can get into it. I can, you can, he can.” Pickens adds that he has given $700 million to philanthropic causes in the last five years and is leaving his estate to charity. “This isn’t about me getting richer; it’s about saving the country.”

Stillwell and the rest of the team, meanwhile, are foraging for stock news on their BlackBerrys. The markets are plummeting again, and what started as a promising day will soon rank as one of the worst in Wall Street history.

“We’re getting hit hard,” Stillwell says. “Real hard.”

Pickens greets two of his college-age grandchildren, Joyce and Michael (who with his two days of facial hair, formfitting polo shirt, and baseball cap reminds me of a character from Caddyshack). Reporters form a semicircle around Pickens, who, while gracious and to the point, seems restless.

After a walk across campus for his next event at the business school, Pickens and his team hold a locked-door emergency meeting to assess the market fallout. Pickens puts his foot on a table and gets on a speakerphone. Then he boots me out. “You don’t need to hear this stuff,” he says gloomily.

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After Pickens’s business school speech we ride back to the airport. Given the financial news, I expected a somber commute, but Pickens perks up as he reflects on his Q&A session with the students.

“Did you hear what the last 10 questions were about?” he asks me. “They all wanted to know about jobs.” The potential for hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the green economy is a major reason his talks on campus are packed these days.

Pickens tells me he loves to speak in front of college crowds because it’s young people who will see his plan through over the next 30 years. And for his plan to work, he says, he needs at least a million people behind it, preferably 2 or 3 million. He has seen the way Al Gore used slide show presentations to shift the country’s attitudes about global warming and knows that it’s not enough to convince a politician or two. The success of his plan, he says, will be his real legacy.

Of course he already has one highly visible legacy: Boone Pickens Stadium at Oklahoma State University. When I asked him what motivated him to donate some $350 million to his alma mater, primarily for OSU’s sports programs, he admitted, “I didn’t want to be associated with a loser.”

He seems to be in a reflective mood, so I ask him what the lowest point in his life was, expecting him to recall the time he was forced out of Mesa Petroleum and had trouble getting back on his feet. Pickens has acknowledged publicly that he suffered from clinical depression during that period.

“Worst?” he says. “I’d have to say four o’clock today.”

Really?

He smiles in a way that implies he has had far worse days but that losing as much money as he did in a single day is never fun.

If nothing else, Pickens has grown to believe in the possibility of resurrection, having pulled himself up from personal and business disappointments that might have finished off a less resilient man. Here, in his final act, he’s looking out for how he will be remembered, hoping it will be as a man of principle, much like his hero Ronald Reagan.

Then he changes the subject to the million people who by the end of the day will have signed up for the Pickens Plan. He has to stay focused, he says, because he doesn’t have all the time in the world.

“You know, I’ve been a rich guy for a long while, and when I go to Washington people will meet with me, but I’ve always had to wait half an hour, and afterward they thank me and I never hear from them again. That’s why I tell these young people, if you get behind me — if I’ve got a million people behind me — I think they’re going to start listening to this old rich guy and I’ve got a helluva better chance of getting things done.”

I ask him if he would consider leading a million-man march on the capital. He’s clearly intrigued.

Can you imagine it? I ask him.

“I can,” he says. “I like that image.”

 

This article originally appeared in the January 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.

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