T. Boone Pickens wants your water

[ray of light]

http://www.dcexaminer.com/opinion/columns/TimothyCarney/T_Boone_Pickens_wants_your_water.html

T. Boone Pickens wants your water

By Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist | 8/21/08 7:10 PM Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is about to make a killing by selling water he doesn’t own. As he does it, it will be praised as a planet-friendly wind project. After he pulls it off, the media will deride it as craven capitalism. In truth, it is one the most audacious examples of politics for profit, showing how big government helps the biggest business steal from the rest of us. The plotline behind Pickens’ water-and-wind scheme is almost too rich to believe. If it were a movie script, reviewers would dismiss it as over-the-top.

The basic story amounts to this: Pickens, thanks to favors from state lawmakers whose campaigns he funded, has created a new government whose only voters are two of his employers; this has empowered Pickens to more cheaply pump water from an aquifer and, by use of eminent domain, seize land across 11 counties in order to pipe the water to Dallas. To win environmentalist approval of this hardly “sustainable” practice, he has piggybacked this water project onto a windmill project pitched as an alternative to oil.

Pickens’ scheme is a perfect demonstration of why it’s worth asking cui bono — who benefits — from regulatory and environmental initiatives. Last week, this column pointed out that Pickens, before his current lobbying blitz for increased federal support of wind power, built the largest wind farm in the world.

[karynnj]

1. This is the movie, Chinatown, on a bigger scale

with a robber baron - one who has fooled Pelosi and Reid. I wonder if the business now is small enough to fit the description of small business. There need to be real hearing in Congress on this. I assume they fit under Boxer's committee more naturally than small business - Has she commented yet?

[MBS]

2. being from LA, maybe this is why I've never trusted Pickens, and wlll never

trust him. I grew up surrounded by people getting rich just this way. (The water part of the Chinatown plot is real. .ask the ex-farmers in the Owens Valley)