T. Boone Pickens for vice president

You've seen his ads, now heed the message.

Oilman T. Boone Pickens offers an easy explanation about our hunt for energy in an oil-sloppy world. Much of the oil comes from places that are politically sloppy, environmentally sloppy and dangerously sloppy.

Instead, Pickens often says in his TV spots that wind is America's oil. In the depressed and depopulated upper Great Plains, wind is an underused commodity. It races toward Chicago — the Windy City — but as it scours the plains, it could do a little work on its way.

A 2005 Stanford University study cited in the Pickens Plan said world wind power could supply global energy demand seven times over, with only 20 percent of world wind power captured.

Pickens himself is building the world's largest wind farm in Pampa, a town in the Texas Panhandle. Jerry Brown of California tried something similar when he was governor, but that forest of windmills, when last seen, was out of date and out of energy. Near Palm Springs, the highest real estate in Southern California is cheek by jowl with windmills.

We have in our vice-presidential candidates a senator who knows intimately the power centers of the world, and a governor who knows something about oil and natural-gas benefits to her state. We have no one who could be called a true energy producer and expert, so while there is still time, one of the parties should snap up T. Boone.

He's great on TV, which is now a necessity. He's rich, but voters don't hold wealth against candidates who talk plain. And he understands that each piece of the energy puzzle, from oil to natural gas to wind power, is the summation of an energy policy.

Pickens would also be quite a breath of air as secretary of energy. The energy secretary holds lots of secrets about nuclear arsenals but also must be someone who can speak from outside the various industries of energy.

In 15 years, we have had so many secretaries of energy come through this office, their names could fill the telephone book of a small town. The current secretary at a 2005 journalists briefing in Washington, D.C., mistakenly placed Washington's gigantic Hanford nuclear waste site in Oregon.

The evidence seems plain that all forms of energy production are needed. Dams for hydro come to mind. Last month, Sen. Barack Obama toured a turbine manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania, where the brightest metal is shaped to turn water into electricity. As he admired the skills of the plant's workers, someone should have asked the candidate: Where should we put these turbines? Do you want them on the rivers of the West, the rivers of Brazil, the rivers that cross the U.S.-Canadian border?

It is not the technology that is so difficult, it is the placement of it that takes years to resolve.

Neither Washington senators Patty Murray nor Maria Cantwell are enthusiastic about offshore drilling but both are willing to consider it as part of a larger energy bill — with reservations and protections. Cantwell is less enthused than Murray but both also want to see investment (meaning tax breaks) in renewable energy, especially extensions of the tax credits for alternative-energy projects, including wind.

Murray is open to some offshore drilling "in the right places in the right way," a spokeswoman told The Seattle Times. She added most of Washington's coast would not be affected because it is covered by the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.

Oil companies already have 68 million acres of federal land leased for possible oil exploration — but there is no activity. The question is, why not?

Sen. Cantwell would also like to see increased market transparency so regulators can ensure market manipulation of gas prices do not occur, a spokeswoman told The Times.

All right, most of us can live with all of that. Do more drilling with strong controls, experiment more with natural gas in vehicles, make friends with the wind, with solar, review and retool the whole nuclear power industry. Do many things instead of just doing one thing.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at www.seattletimes.com/edcetera