Dear Editor,

In a struggling economy, and an oil deficiency causing mass amounts of money to leave America, we need solutions, not just ideas for change.

T. Boone Pickens offers his plan to move us from our addiction to foreign oil. Pickens admits that his plan is not a plan to fix our problem completely, but instead it will be a bridge plan to get to where we, as a country, eventually want to be.

Pickens offers a plan to begin using multiple energy sources, including natural gas. If the Pickens Plan goes into effect many things will change, and some prices might be altered as well. The most important aspect of the Pickens Plan is that it exists!

T. Boone Pickens is a wealthy businessman and is taking an interest in Americans’ energy use. For many elections now, politicians have made campaign promises to help get America to another energy resource, and some things have happened. In politics each step goes very slow and the best opportunity we have to save us from our addiction to foreign oil is for businesses to take the initiative and lead the way.

America uses 25 percent of the world’s oil and America is only 4 percent of the world’s population. To attain this percentage of the world’s oil, America spends $700 billion annually. In essence anything we do to become less dependent on foreign oil will be a vast improvement.

The Pickens Plan is based around utilizing our wind and natural gas resources.

The plan will use the open land of the Midwest to gather wind energy. Sweetwater, Texas will be the base of the wind operation, and Pickens also notes that these wind farms will also revitalize the small towns and create more jobs.

Pickens also plans to utilize our abundant natural gas supply. Not only is natural gas more available in the United States, it is also 80 percent cleaner than oil. Another great reason to switch to natural gas is that across America there are over 1.5 million gas pipe and distribution lines. These pipes, already in place, save us money and then give us the opportunity to build infrastructure to get the gas to the surface, which will create more jobs for our depleting economy.

In the past 10 years, scientists have also been able to triple our supply of natural gas. This exponential increase will not continue, but natural gas will buy our generation the time to develop a better and more permanent solution to our energy woes.

Brooks Veazey

Indian Springs