Are You Picken My Nose?

Barack Obama met with Slim Pickens recently (“Oh, he’s not so bad,” he said to a liberal supporter about the man who financed the Swift Boat attack ads). A recent poll showed that 75% of Americans support his plan. I should be fuming mad about the reception America has given to the man’s napkin sketch of a strategy.

Yet, I’m not banging my head against the wall. Why not? Because I caught the nonegarian (he’s probably not really 90 years old—he just looks it) on PBS’ News Hour a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned something that he has previously omitted in his description of the plan. Cars, he says, are not his main target for NG conversion. “It’s the trucks. They belch diesel oil and they are bought and operated by businesspeople, not consumers.” What’s that, Slim? Are you actually starting to make sense?

Forget that taking NG out of power production is a disastrous idea. Forget that we don’t have the technology yet for cheap conversion of petroleum engines. The concept of incentivizing truck owners to switch over to natural gas has real merit. The technology is close. The space constraints and passenger safety issues aren’t there when you mount everything on the top of your trailer. And the pennies that can be saved over the course of several years are enough to make it worthwhile for a business owner.

The concept works on class 8 long-haul freighters as well as it does on the Dodge Ram your plumber drives. It thus removes our biggest NOx producing engines from the road while at the same time lowering the demand for diesel.

Now if Pickens could just figure out where all that extra gas is going to come from (No, Slim, it can’t come from the wells that you own), we might just have a real plan.