DALLAS, TX – Legendary billionaire oilman turned green energy cheerleader T. Boone Pickens is hedging his bets on the Pickens Plan – his proposal to promote alternatives to oil, including natural gas, wind, and solar – with a “Pickens Plan B” that will promote rubber band power as a replacement for oil and coal-fueled engines and turbines. “It worked for Wile E. Coyote,” said Pickens, a member of the board of Acme Company, the main supplier of rubber-band-powered devices for Mr. Coyote’s futile attempts to catch the Roadrunner. “The Roadrunner turned him into a vegetarian and Acme turned him into an environmentalist.”
Pickens’ Plan B is tied in – literally as well as figuratively – with his plan to build the world’s largest wind farm by installing large wind turbines in parts of four Texas Panhandle counties. As the windmills turn, they will twist a forty-mile-long rubber band stretched up the driveway of one of Pickens’ many mansions into the 80-car garage, which has been converted into a 79-car garage and a space for a rubber-band-powered generator. “When the wind dies down, I just reverse the thing-a-mabob on the whositz connected to the rubber band and we can generate power for three major cities with enough left over for my buddy Wile E.’s battery-powered roller skates,” explained Pickens.
Pickens hasn’t yet found a supplier for the 40-mile-long rubber band. He’s hoping to hook up rubber plant farmers in Brazil with a taffy-machine-maker in New Jersey to build the band. In addition to money from his own pocket, Pickens is counting on investments from the airline industry, which still has secret plans for a 500-passenger rubber-band-powered balsa wood jetliner designed in the early 1960’s by Howard Hughes.
Progress on Pickens’ rubber band generator could be delayed by a lawsuit filed this week in federal court by the estate of Rube Goldberg.