Ted Turner and T. Boone Pickens, two rich, famous, gifted gabbers with big stakes in energy, are uninhibited about saying why U.S. energy policy remains fundamentally unchanged.

“The oil and coal lobbies, who are holding the hill and have all the money, have done a masterful job of confusing everybody. I even go to bed at night praying for clean coal and I know there is no such thing,” Turner at a joint appearance at the National Press Club last week. “But I’ve seen so many ads for it that they’re persuading me that it’s possible.”

Ted Turner and T. Boone Pickens may be old pitchmen, but they’re our old pitchmen.

It is likely Pickens wanted to do a push for passage of H.R. 1380, legislation that would subsidize a transition from diesel gasoline to natural gas for heavy transport, and got his pal Turner, once known as The Mouth of the South, to join him.

“If President Obama had just taken the energy and climate change bill and put it first, before health care, we’d have gotten it,” Turner said. But the Democrats’ political capital and resources were expended “and then the coal and oil industry counter-attacked with their ad campaign and the solar and wind industries ran out of money and couldn’t match them and we just got beat.”

But Turner remains optimistic. “I foresee, 20 years from now, a world where there is no more fossil fuel, where it’s not being used anymore,” Turner said. “It served us well for several hundred years, since the time of the Industrial Revolution, but it’s time to move on to clean renewable energy,” he said, then added as an afterthought, “with natural gas as a bridge fuel, probably.”

A world without fossil fuel pollution, Turner said, would be “a real nice world.” He then looked directly at the audience, grinned, and said, “We’re either gonna do it or we’re gonna die.”

“I want to talk about energy security,” Pickens began. It was the familiar Pickens Plan refrain. “We have no energy plan. Forty years without an energy plan. Why? Because we had cheap oil. Neither party ever had an energy plan.” It has been, he said, “an obvious bipartisan effort to not do anything.”

But, Pickens said, “in 10 years, we’ll pay $300 or $400 per barrel for oil and be importing 75 percent of our oil,” because “oil’s a finite resource and it’s running out.” And, Pickens added, “you’ll be able to check whether Boone knows what he’s talking about. In the fourth quarter of this year, demand is projected to be 90 million barrels a day and I don’t think the world can produce 90 million. If they can’t, the only way you can kill demand is with price.”

Then came Pickens’ pitch for natural gas as a heavy transport fuel. “It’s cleaner, it’s cheaper, it’s abundant and it’s ours. Why not?”

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