The strangest and longest battle of the American West was fought not between early settlers and Indians but between two collectors of fossils. The Bone Wars, as the bitter clash became known, raged in the shadow of remote cliffs, in desert encampments, in university laboratories, and on the pages of academic journals.
Last week, Pickens stopped by The Times to discuss his push to wean the U.S. off foreign oil by dramatically ramping up development of its infrastructure for wind and natural gas. Below is a partial transcript.
T. Boone Pickens: We are now importing oil that costs us $700 billion a year. That's four and a half times what the Iraq war costs. Nobody running for president even speaks about this. Yet they talk a lot about the Iraq war. When you look at it, the world oil supply is about 85 million barrels of oil a day. And demand is about 86-plus million barrels a day.
It was a day when the shift from the past to the future was almost palpable.
It started Thursday morning in Berkeley where Green Wombat was moderating a panel of tech luminaries gathered at the University of California's Global Technology Leaders Conference. As Shai Agassi, founder of electric car infrastructure company Better Place, makes the case for harnessing Silicon Valley's technological innovation to Detroit's manufacturing might to create a sustainable car industry, dispatches from the automotive apocalypse roll down my BlackBerry: Ford (F) shares sink to $1.01…GM's (GM) stock falls to its lowest level since World War II…U.S. automakers beg for a bailout…California Congressman Henry Waxman ousts Michigan's John Dingell - the Duke of Detroit - from his 28-year chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Agassi slips out of the conference and an hour later I catch up with him across the Bay at San Francisco City Hall where he and representatives of Governor Arnold SchWarzenegger and the mayors of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland announce a $1 billion project to build a regional network of electric car charging stations. Better Place has signed similar deals with governments in Israel, Denmark and Australia, but California is the company's first foray into the U.S. market. Planning for the Bay Area network begins in 2009 with construction scheduled to start in 2010 and commercial rollout set for 2012.
The U.S. government will spend tens of millions of dollars to assess and clean up uranium contamination across the vast Navajo Reservation, but the effort is unlikely to erase decades of frustration over what has been characterized as a slow and sporadic federal response.
The new five-year plan is the first coordinated push to measure and fix the environmental damage that resulted from a Cold War hard-rock mining boom in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -
U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander came to Oak Ridge on Friday to promote a five-year project aimed at making America energy independent and more environmentally friendly within a generation.
Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, is comparing his proposal to the World War II-era Manhattan Project, when the nation worked feverishly and secretly to develop atomic weapons. Oak Ridge's people and facilities played a key role in that project.
Inspired by the promise of vastly increased flight durations, the Russian and American militaries experimented with nuclear powered aircraft for two decades, but the concept never progressed beyond a handful of trials. Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works claims to have the solution in its grasp, unveiling plans for a compact nuclear fusion generator that could power everything from aircraft to naval vessels within ten years.