"There's not much to Sweetwater except for wild grasses, scraggy mesquite trees and rattlesnakes (Sweetwater hosts its famous Rattlesnake Roundup each spring). The gently rolling terrain and vegetation make it ideal for raising cattle, which is what its first settlers did in the 19th century, and what their descendants do today. A regional oil boom in the 1950s and 1960s poured money into the area's economy, as have two oil revivals since: one in the 1980s and one now. But the exciting new industry in town is wind energy. You can drive for 150 miles along Interstate 20 and never be out of sight of a giant wind turbine, claims Sweetwater Mayor Greg Wortham, who does double duty as executive director of the West Texas Wind Energy Consortium.  Were it a country all by itself, Nolan County, Texas, would rank sixth on the list of wind-energy-producing nations, says Wortham. Year-round wind conditions, the terrain, low land prices and a small population make it an ideal location for wind farms. It already produces more wind-generated electricity in a year than all of California. And the business is growing so fast that he struggles to define it by numbers. By year's end, there'll be more than 1,500 turbines in Nolan County, representing a $5 billion investment. In the multicounty Rolling Plains region, there are already 2,000 operating turbines. Add those operating further west, the Permian Basin region around Midland and Odessa, and the entire area has more than 3,000 turbines operating, producing about 6,000 megawatts of electricity — about equal to the power produced by two to three nuclear power plants."

                                                               Growth potential

"The growth potential is, well, electrifying.   New turbine towers are going up at a rate of three to four a day in the Sweetwater area, Wortham says. "It depends on the (Texas) Public Utility Commission, but the number could be 20,000 ultimately," Wortham says.   Pickens, who over the past two years has become the USA's biggest wind-power booster, is quick to note that "there could be lots of Sweetwaters out there," especially in the nation's midsection, where winds are ideal for power generation.  Indeed, though Sweetwater is a windy place, plenty of locations farther north in the Great Plains are even better suited to wind farming. One is about 250 miles north of Sweetwater, near Pampa, northeast of Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle. That's where Pickens is building what would be the world's largest wind farm, four times larger than the current titleholder near here. So far, he has spent $2 billion on the project, including a record purchase of nearly 700 wind turbines this year from General Electric. He expects to spend up to $10 billion on the project and to begin generating electricity in 2011.


                                                              Natural Gas Cars
       "The key, Pickens says, is that wind energy can be used as a substitute for natural gas now burned to generate electricity. That, in turn, will make far more natural gas available for use as a transportation fuel. Pickens' plan is to produce enough wind power within 10 years to divert 20% of the natural gas now used to fuel power plants for use in cars and trucks. That's much more aggressive a growth plan for the development of wind energy than envisioned by the Department of Energy, which doesn't expect the USA to be getting 20% of its total energy needs from wind until at least 2030.
         "Pickens foresees as many as a third of the vehicles running on natural gas within only a few years. Julius Pretterebner, director of the Global Oil Group at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, says getting 15% to 20% of the USA's cars to run on natural gas — in some cases, in mixtures with other fuels in dual-fuel vehicles — by 2020 would be an outstanding achievement, and doing that will require federal support to expand the necessary infrastructure.Powering vehicles with compressed or liquefied natural gas, CNG or LNG, has been Pickens' pet project since the late 1980s.Yet the concept has been very slow to catch on.

          "Distribution is a major problem. CNG drivers can, like Pickens, install inexpensive equipment to fill up at their homes. But with fewer than 800 natural gas filling stations around the USA, drivers can't count on being able to fill up wherever they go. So, for the most part, CNG, or LNG, has remained limited to fleet operators, such as local bus companies or big-city police departments.   And that's where David Friedman, research director in the vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says most natural-gas-powered vehicles will continue to be operated because of the distribution problem, the lack of vehicles made specifically to run on CNG, and the cost of converting conventional vehicles to run on CNG.  "I honestly think (natural gas') role will be in medium- to heavy-duty vehicles and fleets — and as a stepping stone to hydrogen fuel-cell-powered vehicles in the future," Friedman says. Only one car, a version of the Honda Civic, is available from the factory ready for CNG fuel, he says, and only at a significant premium over the price of a conventionally fueled version.

                                                    Support from The Sierra Club

        "Pickens aims to shout down the skeptics by taking his case to the people via his TV ad campaign. If the nation is to break its addiction to foreign oil, a network of CNG stations could be built along interstates and in major cities for a relatively small investment, he says. Some gasoline retailers have told him they would add CNG pumps to their stations once they're certain there'll be enough vehicles capable of running on natural gas to justify costs.

          "Washington, Pickens adds, "can encourage the move to natural-gas-powered vehicles by providing modest economic incentives for fuel retailers to invest in CNG pumps at their stations, for automakers to build CNG-powered cars and for individuals to convert their existing vehicles to CNG use. And it should continue to provide tax incentives for another 10 years to encourage wind energy's rapid development as part of an overall plan to wean the nation from foreign oil, he says.

          " "It certainly would be cheaper than what they're doing already for nuclear," Pickens adds. But he's also in favor of developing more nuclear energy, and every form of alternative energy to reduce oil imports. "Try everything. Do everything. Nuclear. Biomass. Coal. Solar. You name it. I support them all," he says. "But there's only one energy source that can dramatically reduce the amount of oil we have to import each year, and that's (natural) gas."

           "   Pickens is an outspoken believer in the so-called peak oil theory that holds that maximum world production has peaked at about 85 million barrels a day — vs. current demand of about 86 million barrels a day — and will never rise much above that even with lots of new drilling and production.   "Even people who continue driving gasoline-powered cars and trucks will benefit" from his plan, he says.  Critics could easily accuse Pickens of advocating a major new public policy initiative that will line his own pockets. He is, after all, a big player in both the wind power and natural gas businesses. Pickens says while his hedge fund will earn money for its investors, earning more money personally is meaningless: "I'm 80 years old and have $4 billion. I don't need any more money."   He's more concerned that his efforts to make reducing foreign oil dependency the No. 1 issue on the national agenda will be dismissed by the public and, therefore, by Washington. So he says he's carefully steering his plan clear of partisan bickering.

          "   He's already enlisted an unlikely supporter: the Sierra Club. "I will be in the front row of the chorus cheering" him on, says Carl Pope, its executive director, who flew with Pickens to Sweetwater.

                                 Insider Trading by Bush's Buddy, Ken Lay

                            Kenneth Lay of Enron disguised his insider sales of Enron.  "During 2001 he
                         repeatedly drew down an Enron line of credit in order to answer margin calls from banks
                         and repaid it by selling almost $80 million of stock back to the company. Yet because
                         such sales don’t technically have to be disclosed until year-end, anyone looking at
                         publicly available information would have thought that Lay’s stock ownership was
                         slightly increasing (as a compelling slide put up by Hueston showed), when in fact he
                         was unloading almost two-thirds of his Enron shares.... (It is) easy...to legally circumvent
                         SEC rules as an insider... (T)his is another reason not to take reported insider transactions
                         too seriously.
                                  (Source: http://www.fatpitchfinancials.com/314/tracking-insider-trading/   )
                     

  
                       Cheney Shafts Californian Consumers

                             "In the spring of 2001 the severity of the California energy emergency had inspired
                     demands for government action, and Enron had a problem. Officials in California were
                     arguing that federal price caps on wholesale energy sales would prevent profiteering and
                     stabilize wildly fluctuating energy markets, and even some Republicans were saying that
                     caps made sense. But the caps would cost Enron--which had come to dominate energy
                     markets by taking advantage of deregulation--a fortune.

                            "Enron CEO Kenneth Lay knew he needed high-level help. So he arranged to meet
                     with a man who had headed a corporation with extensive business ties to Enron and who
                     had been a prime recipient of Enron's political largesse. Vice President Dick... At the meeting
                     Lay handed Cheney a memo that read in part: "The administration should reject any attempt
                      to re-regulate wholesale power markets by adopting price caps...."    The day after he met
                     with Lay, Cheney gave a rare phone interview to the Los Angeles Times...Price caps were
                     out of the question. Dismissing the strategy as "short-term political relief for the
                     politicians," Cheney bluntly declared, "I don't see that as a possibility."

                           "Cheney's prognosis was flawed; within days, the Federal Energy Regulatory
                      Commission agreed to price caps and the markets calmed down. But Cheney was undeterred
                      in his drive to deliver for Enron. The Houston-based firm enjoyed a level of vice-presidential
                      attention during the Bush/Cheney team's first year that included explicit support of Enron's
                      choices for key regulatory positions, intervention in the affairs of a foreign government
                      and the structuring of an energy policy task force to allow Enron and other corporations
                      to effectively set policy... He (Cheney) told the Today show that he wants to 'protect the
                      ability of the President and the Vice President to get unvarnished information advice from
                      any source we want,'" notes former White House counsel John Dean. "That sounds
                      all too familiar to me. I worked for Richard Nixon."
                      (Source: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020415/nichols )

                               In his second week in office George W. Bush created the task force, officially known
                    as the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG) with Dick Cheney as chairman.
                    This group was supposed to “develop a national energy policy designed to help the private
                    sector, and, as necessary and appropriate, State and local governments, promote dependable,
                    affordable, and environmentally sound production and distribution of energy for the future."  
                    You can  read their final plan here.

                              Because both Bush and Cheney came from the same oil and gas industry that had heavily
                     financed his campaign,  critics have charged that the energy industry was exercising undue
                     influence over national policy.  The secrecy with which Cheney's Energy Task Force met added
                     to these suspicions. To no one's surprise, a newly Bush appointed Republican judge has ruled
                     that these meetings with oil and gas company executives are not public, though the taxpayer paid
                     for them and the conclusions have directly taken money from the taxpayers' pockets. (From
                     September 1995 until leaving in March 1997, Judge Bates had worked as Deputy Independent
                     Counsel for Kenneth Starr and the Independent Counsel's office during the investigation into
                     President Clinton.  On July 19, 2007, he dismissed a lawsuit filed by Valerie Plame Wilson and
                     her husband against Vice President Dick Cheney, White House political adviser Karl Rove,
                     former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and former Deputy Secretary of State
                     Richard Armitage.)

                            Most of the activities of the Energy Task Force had not been disclosed to the public,
                    even though Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (since 19 April 2001) have sought to
                    gain access to its materials. The organisations Judicial Watch and Sierra Club launched a law suit (U.S.
                    District Court for the District of Columbia: Judicial Watch Inc. v. Department of Energy, et al.,
                    Civil Action No. 01-0981) under the FOIA to gain access to the task force's materials.

                              "On 5 March 2002 the US Government was ordered to make a full disclosure;
                     this has not happened, pending appeal. In the Summer of 2003 a partial disclosure of these
                     materials was made by the Commerce Department. This resulted in the release of documents,
                     maps, and charts, dated March 2001, of Iraq's, Saudi Arabia's and United Arab Emirates' oil fields,
                     pipelines, refineries, tanker terminals and development projects. That case eventually went to
                    the Supreme Court and the ruling was to send the case back to the Court of Appeals."

                                 One Meeting with Environmentalists.  40+ Meetings with Oil Companies.

                             "On April 4, 2001, representatives of 13 environmental groups, including Erich Pica of Friends
                     of the Earth and Anna Aurilio of the U.S. Public Interest Group, met with the Task Force
                     (although not with Vice President Cheney personally). [1] Environmental groups have speculated
                     that this meeting was an attempt to appease them, since it is reported that a draft paper had
                     already been produced at the time of this meeting and that half of the meeting was spent on various
                     members introducing themselves. No further meetings between the task force and the environmental
                     groups were reported, although there had been at least 40 meetings between the task force and
                     representatives of the energy industry and its interest groups ^[1]     ...                          

                           "On July 18, 2007, the Washington Post reported the names of those involved in the
                     Task Force, including at least 40 meetings with interest groups, most of them from
                     energy-producing industries. Among those in the meetings were James J. Rouse, then
                     vice president of Exxon Mobil and a major donor to the Bush inauguration; Kenneth L. Lay,
                     then head of Enron Corp.; Jack N. Gerard, then with the National Mining Association;
                     Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum Institute; and Eli Bebout, an old friend of
                     Cheney's from Wyoming who serves in the state Senate and owns an oil and drilling company.^[1]

                    (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Task_Force )

            .