Saudi royal: "U.S. can't be energy-independent"

So says Prince Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to Washington and a key member of the Saudi royal family:

"You can't get rid of oil. You can't get rid of fossil fuels — gas and coal — unless you want to price yourself out of existence," Prince Turki al-Faisal, former ambassador to Washington, told editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

"I'd hope that the general public in the United States would be wiser than to be deceived into thinking that the U.S. can ever be energy independent," he said.

"The U.S. has rising energy needs despite the economic downturn," Prince Turki said. "If you are going to be paying for wind, electric and solar energy equivalents that cost five or 10 times more than it costs to use oil, you are going to price yourself out of the market. You are going to lose whatever competitiveness you have in your products."

"Politicians, when they do that,{promise energy independence} I think they are misleading their publics," he said.

During his election campaign last year, President Obama said, "I will set a clear goal as president. In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil in the Middle East."

In one sense what Prince Turki is saying is the simple truth - abandoning fossil fuels, especially combined with Obama's cap and trade nonsense is a road to bankruptcy.

But it's also worth remembering that the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with an estimated 400-600 years worth of supply.and that we can gasify coal at about fifty bucks a barrel or less. It's a proven technology that's been around since WWII (Hitler used it to keep his war machine running) and has been vastly improved since. And that doesn't include our resources of shale oil or America's own oil sources, which we're barely utilizing at the moment.

There's also nuclear power, something the Europeans and the Japanese embraced after the Arabs turned off the spigot in the 1970's.

And we could also try building a few refineries, which is where the real bottleneck in gasoline occurs.

Add all this to ramping up our domestic production and some basic conservation measures and and the US could achieve energy independence in a remarkably short space of time..certainly within one four-year presidential term. That would buy us the time we need and then some to develop the new energy technologies for the future. Not to mention a slew of high paid US jobs, a boost for our economy, more oil to sell to other countries and strategic leverage in certain areas where we need it.

Of course, if we did that two things would happen. First, government figures would no longer have the same access to what I like to call the Arab Oil Producers Government Pension Augmentation Plan, where Presidential libraries, honorariums, consulting fees,retainers, investments in certain financial instruments and foundations get paid for by certain cash flush oil producing nations.

Second, government would take a major tax hit,because higher gas prices mean higher tax revenues. In my native state that means the county, the state and the feds garner about 80 cents plus per gallon in taxes - the higher the price, the more they make. On power, it's a whopping ten percent of the bill locally.

In case you wondered, that's why the US isn't energy self-sufficient yet.