T Boone Pickens is not your average tree-hugger. But the oil veteran and corporate raider is apparently worried about America’s addiction to foreign crude. In a blaze of publicity, he has launched a plan to cut the country’s fuel bill. In a nutshell, it involves building enough windmills to displace the 20 per cent of US electricity generation capacity currently fired by gas. This gas could then fuel cars directly instead, reducing US petrol consumption by 4m barrels per day, or a third of oil imports.

It would be easy to dismiss this as self-serving – Mr Pickens is, after all, currently building the world’s largest wind farm. The bigger bug-bear, however, is practicality. GSW Strategy Group, a US energy consultancy, points out that realising Mr Pickens’ vision would mean increasing the size of the US wind energy fleet 18-fold within 10 years – while also converting almost half the vehicle fleet to run on gas and refitting thousands of service stations.