Long Beach, California—T. Boone Pickens is an energy financier who made a name for himself by becoming an advocate for wind power. But in the face of the changing energy landscape in the US, he's now pushing what he calls an "alternative alternative energy plan." It's not wind, and not solar, but Pickens at least has something the United States utterly lacks: an actual plan. And his plan is one that that puts the US first, which, unsurprisingly, was a polarizing view at the ever-globally minded TED Conference.

Pickens set the stage for his US-first argument by describing what has happened over the last 40 years as "the greatest transfer of wealth form one group to another group in history." How much? According to Pickens, the US has seen more than $7 trillion of wealth transferred out of the US economy into OPEC nations since 1976. How did this come to be?

In 1912, as Pickens tells it, our country was facing an energy crisis. We were considering crude oil, whale blubber, and coal as possible ways to power our future. We needed something that was cheap, and we didn't care where we bought it. Our society chose crude oil, and to this day oil remains at the center of American energy consumption. The problem, of course, is that crude oil is no longer cheap. Some might also note that crude oil has a tremendously negative effect on our environment, but Pickens did not bother to talk about that.

One hundred years after our last transformational energy crisis, Pickens said we must decide what we are going to use in the future, and commit to a plan. We know our needs: something that's cleaner and cheaper than crude oil. But Pickens would also insist that it needs to be domestic. "And we have that," he said. "It's natural gas." In fact, "we are overwhelmed with natural gas."

But our access to natural gas is not the only thing to recommend it. Crude oil has many hidden costs. No, we're not talking about climate effects (Pickens didn't address climate in his talk, either). Rather, he points to the US's self-appointed role as the world's "oil police," an expense that is truly massive. Consider this: there are 12 supercarrier class aircraft carriers on Earth. The US has 11 of them, and China is building one. Why does the US have so many? Just look where they congregate when not in American waters: the Middle East.

Pickens noted that the US uses 25 percent of the world's daily consumption of oil each day, to the tune of 20 million barrels. Twelve million of those originate from outside the United States. And all of this power for only four percent of the world's population. The number two consumer of oil is the Chinese, who use half what the US uses (10 million), even though they have five times the population of the United States.

But China is doing things about energy that we are not. China has a transportation and energy plan aimed at making sure the country can meet its needs and sustain economic growth (Including fuel efficiency standards for vehicles that dwarf those in the US). Here in the US, we have no plan—we're the worst off by far, and yet we have no national plan. Pickens finds this astonishingly unwise.

The supply isn't the only concern with oil, either. "The days of cheap oil are over," Pickens notes, but it has little to do with scarcity. The price of oil set by OPEC, by the Saudis, has little to do with the cost of that oil. What we pay for oil from the Saudis has much more to do with the Saudis' social spending commitments in their own country. That is, most of what we're paying for is making Saudi Arabia meet its financial and social obligations.

While this unprecedented wealth transfer is underway, we are sitting on massive amounts of natural gas. In terms of energy equivalents to barrels of oil, Pickens claims that the US has at least 3 times what the Saudis have. Given the fact that crude oil prices will only increase over time, he said it's time to commit to a plan. Even if we don't yet know what the full solution to our energy needs will be, we can at least begin to build a bridge that is headed simultaneously toward the future and away from the past.

Pickens argues that natural gas is the perfect "bridge fuel" that can begin to lessen our dependency on oil, holding us over until the next energy crisis. A first step would be to convert the 8 million heavy trucks in the US to run on natural gas. Then we turn to other aspects of the transportation system. The goal, he argues, should be to move closer and closer to independence from oil. "We have to get on our own resources in America," Pickens pleas. "It is costing us a billion dollars a day for oil," and we are grossly overpaying for it.

Although Pickens never explicitly says so, it is clear that he is less concerned about the effects on climate that burning fossil fuels present. In fact, at one point, he joked that he'll be long dead by the time the problem becomes truly critical (nevermind that many would argue that it already is). "Natural gas is the bridge fuel; I don't have to worry about the bridge to where at my age," he chuckled. Without doubt, Pickens' biggest concern is that we simply stop giving our wealth away to OPEC and others.

This isn't Pickens' first foray into the future of energy, but for what it's worth, he is willing to put his money where his mouth is. The famous oilman did not hesitate to mention that he had lost $150 million on wind farm energy initiatives when price of natural gas fell by a third.

Although most of the TED audience would agree with Pickens that any plan would be better than our current approach, not everyone was comfortable with his "bridge to I-don't-know-where" view, or his willingness to punt climate issues and questions about fracking's impact on future generations. Perhaps more significantly, TED talks have pretty consistently focused on solving humanity's problems as a whole. Pickens' us-versus-them, US-first view of the energy landscape was unique and perhaps jarring. And it was perfect for TED.