Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens is adding a new wrinkle to his push for US energy independence: monthly updates to remind Americans how much money they’re paying for foreign oil.
Pickens, a billionaire who is spending US$60 million on a high-profile campaign to boost the use of wind power and natural gas, said on Tuesday the updates would be a yardstick for measuring the incoming US administration’s progress on its goal of eliminating Middle East oil imports within a decade.
“You watch, we will elevate the interest in this,” he said.
PHOTO: AFP
Pickens and environmental advocate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr said oil-rich Middle East nations are using billions of US dollars to build schools, roads and airports while US infrastructure crumbles. They made the comments during a briefing at the Capitol.
Americans sent US$19.3 billion overseas to foreign governments for their oil last month, said Pickens, citing government figures.
“It is outrageous that we are sending billions of dollars — US$432,000 per minute — overseas to foreign countries while domestic programs at home remain severely underfunded,” said Pickens, who plans to highlight the monthly figures on his Web site.
Pickens met with the leader of the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and several Congress members to promote his plan. He urged them to support a plan for converting 350,000 large commercial trucks such as 18-wheelers to natural gas.
“I think they are thinking about all of this very seriously,” he said.
Pickens last July unveiled a plan to cut oil dependency by increasing the use of wind power and natural gas. Pickens wants to erect wind turbines in the Midwest to generate electricity, replacing the 22 percent of US power produced from natural gas.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS