T. Boone Pickens Sues Mother Nature
over Water Rights
Amarillo, TX | Former oilman and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens has lodged a formal complaint with the Judiciary Tribunal of NAFTA, charging Mother Nature with "dumping" cheap rain into the U.S. market and expropriating his ability to profit from water rights. The National Weather Bureau is named as a co-conspirator.
Pickens mastered the art of the hostile take-over in the 1980's, buying and breaking up companies while putting the employees out of work. His most recent project is to purchase the mineral rights to 150,000 acres in the Texas panhandle, which holds billions of gallons of water in underground aquifers.
He is going ahead with the scheme, despite the fact that building pipelines to transport the water has been described as "mind-bogglingly expensive."
His gamble that future water demands will lead to a bidding war, with Pickens as a major supplier, is disturbingly similar to Enron's relationship with California two years ago, which lead to artificially inflated prices and disastrous energy shortages.
However, record March rainfall in north Texas has adversely effected the short-term value of his contracts by, according to Pickens' complaint, "flooding the market with cheap, offshore water."
Pickens is expected to easily win the lawsuit, since Nature's actions are expressly forbidden under NAFTA's Chapter 11 clause.
While no monetary amount has been specified, Boone has indicated his willingness to drop the litigation if Nature agrees to engender drought conditions this summer.
