This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Billionaire Investor Tiboon Pickens is spelled out a plan to reduce the share of energy the United States

imports.

It calls for a dramatic shift to wind and other forms of alternative energy, but there is more

wrong with his plan than the premise, so says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor.

What Pickens is proposing is to increase wind energy production so that we can free up natural gas, which we use for

electricity purposes as well as for other purposes, and to use that freed up natural gas to run cars instead of refined gasoline.

And that would help reduce our demand for oil as a general matter.

Of course, compressed natural gas has been around as a of course compressed natural gas has been around as an automotive technology for a long time

but whether compressed natural gas is the best substitute for gasoline

or whether a substitute for gasoline is even

necessary remains to be seen. I mean maybe the future means compressed natural gas

vehicles, maybe it means battery-powered vehicles, maybe it means cellulosic

ethanol-powered vehicles, maybe it means plugosic ethanol-powered vehicles.

Maybe it means plug-in hybrids.

Maybe it means methanol.

There are all sorts of different futures one could envision

that would entail reducing gasoline consumption and replacement with something else.

But given the fact that T-Woom Prickens probably does not have a time machine so that he can go

into the future and find out what that optimal fuel is going to be.

This is an example of trying to pick one winner out of a potential field of 10 or more winners

...