Apr. 24--T. Boone Pickens has watched the millions come and go, sometimes in a single day.

He's been high and low, anointed as a savior and lambasted as a vulture. At one point, his life had all the makings of a country-western song. He was ousted from his company while going through a protracted divorce and living in a hotel.

Now, at 80, the legendary -- yes, they call him stuff like that these days -- and sometimes controversial Texas oilman isn't quitting yet.

He has one more thing to do. He wants to solve the nation's energy crisis.

Instead of foreign oil, he wants wind. He wants natural gas. He wants solar and a smart grid.

He's got a plan, and he's been stumping heavily for it since he announced it last July, spending $58 million in the process.

Wednesday, he was in Missouri. Yesterday, he was hoofing it down from the Four Seasons to the Franklin Institute, the wind whipping his navy suit jacket.

The geologist and once-infamous corporate raider has been in the energy business for more than a half-century and is looking spry, thanks to a personal trainer.

He was headed for an 80-minute talk he would deliver as this year's recipient of the Franklin Institute's Bower Award for Business Leadership.

"It really comes down to, I've decided I was the only one that understood the problem, and I was the only one with the solution, and it was a mission for Boone, and that's about it," he said as he crossed a street.

He felt so strongly about it that he woke his new wife up at 2 one morning to tell her so. "I said, 'Madeleine, this has got to be fixed.' "

And she said, " 'I know . . . but let's go back to sleep and do it tomorrow.' "

Inside a packed Franklin lecture hall, he spoke without script or notes.

The problem, as he sees it, is foreign oil. He hammered at the statistics: With just 4 percent of the world's population, this country consumes 25 percent of its oil.

Every year, the United States imports nearly 70 percent of the oil it uses, at a cost of $500 billion, mostly from "people who don't like us" and from countries that are largely unstable.

He called it the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world.

"It's crazy," he said. "We've gone deep into a trap. Nobody led us in there. We went in ourselves."

He calls himself an environmentalist, which may raise the eyebrows of those familiar with his long ties to conservative causes.

In 2004, he gave $2.5 million to Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth, which bought ads criticizing the military record of Sen. John Kerry, then the Democratic presidential nominee.