It's a sad day for America, and for wind: T. Boone Pickens, the vile old conservative billionaire oilman who somehow sold himself as an important environmentalist last year, is abandoning his giant wind farm plan.

Pickens made a lot of money with oil, and then decided that wind farms were an even better way to make money. Because he is a capitalist Republican conservative, he thought his best bet for making a profit on wind power was to get a shitload of money from the government. And so, despite his years of partisan donations and funding of smear campaigns he suddenly played Mr. Concerned Citizen Environmentalist during the 2008 presidential campaign, earning him important meetings with Bloomberg, Obama, McCain, and Harry Reid.

But! Wind power turned out to not even be worth the effort of pretending to care about it as a front for taking lots of government money to build natural gas pipelines, so he is giving up on his "world's largest wind farm" plan. Because, hey, natural gas prices fell, and the money being handed out to people pretending to free us from foriegn oil dried up, and the gub'mint won't pay for his transmission lines until 2013.