T. Boone Pickens in town tonight for the Chamber dinner, downtown at the new (gasp!) convention center.

Pickens, of course, recently scrapped his plans to build the world’s largest wind farm, due to the falling price of oil and a scarcity of funding. What I didn’t know was that the “Pickens plan” was connected at the hip with his plan to sell water - Businessweek reporting earlier this month:

Pickens owns more water than any other individual in America. For several years he has been buying up the rights to underground water in the Texas Panhandle with the idea that he could one day pipe it to Dallas, some 250 miles southeast. Pickens’ Dallas-based Mesa Power had hoped to use the extraordinary power of eminent domain to force landowners along the proposed route to allow him to lay water pipes and erect the power lines to transmit electricity from the wind farm.

Hm. All that makes him sound a little less virtuous, don’t you think?

Nonetheless, that’s a good conversation to have - if this country is ever to get serious about alternative energy, which we should even though oil prices have dropped, it may ultimately require things like eminent domain being used to create the infrastructure. And imagine the fight that would trigger - with the people whose land would be affected joining forces with an hydrocarbon industry that wants to protect its hegemony, using media mouthpieces like Glenn Beck or Limbaugh to talk about how it all amounts to fascism.

That’s why this country will never, ever get serious about alternative energy. That’s why this country, long term, is well and truly screwed.