Q. Why should businesses care about U.S.dependency onforeign oil? How does the dependency directly affect them?
The price of oil will continue to go up, and businesses won’t have any choice but to pay the price. By using sustainable energy from the U.S., there won’t be a price hike. There’s been a yo-yo effect over the last 40
years that started in the ’70s. When the price of gas runs up, they over-supply the market, drop the price and any idea about using renewable is stopped. You can look back and the pattern is the same except the price never goes down as low as it was before. So now you’re working off a price that was up to $140 a barrel,
which is now down to $60 or $50, but do you like paying $50 a barrel knowing the price is going to go back to at least $140 at some point? You don’t have any control over your destiny using foreign oil. As a businessperson who sees a fuel that runs cleaner, is domestic and creates more jobs in America, I would say that certainly beats buying foreign oil. With foreign oil, the money’s gone, no jobs came with it, no taxes were paid, and it didn’t help the economy. It’s just a drain on us.
Q. Why should businesses care about the Pickens Plan?
Businesses should see the Pickens Plan as a great opportunity to take advantage of cheap gas and oil. This is a once in a lifetime deal for us. Cheap oil has caused us to be addicted. Every time we talked about renewables, every time we started up new U.S. drilling, the Mideast oversup-plied us and drops the prices. If we don’t do anything more than what we’ve done in the last 40 years, then in 10 years forward, we’ll be paying $200 or $300 a barrel and we’ll be importing 75 percent of our oil. And then we’ll be broke. You can’t think the future is foreign oil. The future is sustainables. Businesses also need to consider plans that aren’t just for their business, but a way to improve America. That’s part of good business practices.
