Mainstream journalist Charlie Rose smells a rat

Planet Gore on National Review Online

Rose’s eyes were wide open Sunday night when the billionaire owner of Clean Energy Fuels, the nation’s largest natural gas vehicle fueling company, laid out his rent-seeking scheme.

Step One: Pickens explained that, in the name of (cue trumpets) independence from foreign oil, all of America’s natural gas resources must be directed to transportation (beginning with the trucking industry), thus reducing oil consumption by 25 percent.

Step Two: Replace the resulting hole in the electricity market (natural gas is 23 percent of our electricity supply) with wind power. How to get utilities to accept wind power? asked Rose. “That may be a mandate,” Pickens sheepishly replied.

Rose smelled a rat. Pickens, he explained, “wants to be on the front lines and poised to make a profit.”

That would the understatement of the year. In fact it is hard to come up with a more cynical, self-serving plan by an industrialist. As one of the country’s largest natural-gas and wind-farm investors, Pickens plan sets himself up to make billions by having the government guarantee his risk and mandate a market for the vast resources he owns.