The is a guest post by freelance environmental writer Tom Schueneman, publisher of GlobalWarmingisReal.com

You wouldn’t necessarily expect Bill Clinton and the Democratic party to have very much in common with oilman and 2004 “Swift Boat” funder T. Boone Pickens (who helped finance the ads that slighted John Kerry’s service in Vietnam during the last presidential election), but these are strange times we live in.

As Hugh Jackson writes in the Guardian, it isn’t as if Pickens is about to endorse Obama, it’s just that he is serious about the need for a new energy economy.

“This is one emergency that we can’t drill our way out of” says Pickens in a national TV ad touting his ‘Pickens Plan’ (curiously, NBC has declined to run Pickens’ latest ad), and it’s a message the Democrats are all over. Especially Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who got Pickens and Bill Clinton together as headliners for a recent renewable energy conference in Nevada, home of one of the world’s largest solar energy plants.

When the message from the McCain camp is a simple Drill Here, Drill Now, what Democrat could resist the iconic oilman embracing a new energy economy?

That doesn’t mean the Pickens is against drilling offshore or in Alaska, he’s for it. As for Reid, his record is far from squeaky clean when it comes to mining reform. Bill Clinton remains the man many love to hate; all I have to do is mention the name “Al Gore” and some people get apoplectic.

Nonetheless all these folks agree on one thing: importing nearly 70% of our oil and sending $700 billion – $700 billion – of our wealth overseas to feed our “addiction” (George Bush’s term) is a fool’s errand.

Pickens might be an opportunistic capitalist pig. Reid may hold sway to the power of gold (mining, that is). Clinton is a megalomaniac and Al Gore spews enough hot air to raise global temperature another degree.

But it’s a crisis folks, and these are the people, all no doubt enormously flawed, who nonetheless call the way out of the oil-soaked mess we’re in.

Strange times indeed.

Photo credit: Webalalza.com