“Work eight hours and sleep eight hours and make sure that they are not the same hours.”

– T. Boone Pickens

Of all the people you might expect to spearhead a movement away from oil and onto alternative energy, T. Boone Pickens probably wouldn’t be at the top of the list.

Pickens’ Wind Farm Delayed; Apple Tarnished by SEC Scrutiny; UBS May Settle Tax Dispute; Higher Gas Prices Help Reduce Traffic; Discount Retailer Thrives in Recession; Pepsi Bottling Profits Rise

Microsoft’s Bing Off to Strong Start; U.S. Natural Gas Reserves Higher Than Once Thought; Carnival Cruise Lines Beats the Street; Treasuries Fall Again; GE Capital May Come Under Fed Scrutiny; Mexico’s Tourism Plummets on Swine Flu Scare; Discover Profits Down

T. Boone Pickens thought oil was going to hit $150 last year and go up from there. I don’t mean to pick on him. He’s worth about $3 billion. He’s earned his stripes. I have nothing but respect for the man.

Pickens wasn’t the only person who got 2008 wrong. There were plenty of others.

When it comes down to it, anybody can make predictions. It’s not very hard. But it is hard to make ones that do what they purport to do: predict.

My advice is to take them with a grain of salt. If predicting the markets were so easy to do, most of Wall Street’s brightest fund managers wouldn’t have lost 40 percent or more last year.

I’ve made my share…

In the age of the sound-bite, when one of green energy’s high-profile advocates backs away from a $2-billion project, you know that alternative energy is on life support.

Falling oil prices have hurt a lot of investors, even some of the nation’s so-called energy experts. One of the nation’s oil heroes, T. Boone Pickens, has lost billions in 2008.

I am not sure this country should follow the advice of a man that has lost over $2 billion so far this year. But then again, some of the nation’s most powerful men have lost far more than that in just the past few weeks.

If you spend any time watching your living room television set, you have seen T. Boone Pickens discussing his proposed energy plan. The 80-year old has spent over $58 million of his own money to tell the nation it must lose its dependence on foreign oil.

What…

Commodities across the board are being taken down by the deepening credit crisis. But energy policy is a big issue in the coming presidential elections.

Energy investor T. Boone Pickens says “natural gas is the fuel of the future.” He also says water will become an increasingly scarce commodity with major implications for the agricultural sector.

Chris Mayer agrees with Pickens. He says once the financial crisis ends natural gas and water stocks will attract big bucks.

As the presidential candidates spew nonsense about energy policy, and T. Boone Pickens’s stab at a constructive solution starts to look ever-more shaky, we are faced with this grim reality: Peak Oil is still a “fringe” concept.

Energy expert Dave Gonigam has serious reservations about T. Boone Pickens‘ energy plan.

When the Pickens Plan was first announced, Dave expressed concerns in The Daily Reckoning’s Desidooru Saloon blog about its finer details.

The problem is the Pickens Plan isn’t quite as free market as it claims. Take the proposed $5-billion sale of general bond funds to help finance alternative energy schemes in California. This is more like a back-door subsidy for Pickens’ natural gas agenda. More from Dave below…