No more foreign oil!

I interviewed T. Boone Pickens this morning on the phone. He is, of course, pushing his Pickens Plan to end this nation’s dependence on foreign oil.
But the main purpose of his call was to drum up support for a bill Sen. Orrin Hatch is co-sponsoring, which would nudge the nation’s truckers toward natural gas vehicles.

The Menendez/Hatch Natural Gas Act would provide a credit for the purchase of a natural-gas powered truck. Pickens told me this would be $65,000 per truck. Using his own figure of 6.5 million diesel trucks on the road, that amounts to potentially $422.5 billion over several years.
Pickens said this is a matter of national security. This nation is full of easily accessible natural gas. If all diesel trucks made the change, “over seven years it would cut our imports from OPEC in half.”
Then, instead of just being a “sitting duck” waiting for OPEC, Hugo Chavez and other evil forces to set prices, we will have “really crippled some of our enemies.”
With less money, oil-rich tyrannical governments would lose power.
It all sounds great, except that we need a whole infrastructure to get it going. We need places for natural gas vehicles to refuel nationwide. We also need to find a way to spend hundreds of billions more on another government program.
Pickens said the incentive would start the infrastructure rolling as trucks begin to convert. That eventually would lead to more cars that run on natural gas.
As for the money, he said we already spend more than this on gas and oil, and that money goes to fund both sides of the wars we’re fighting. This, he implied, is madness.
What do you think?