By Rob Wile, Business Insider

Some surprising people, including the CEO of Exxon (XOM), think true American energy independence is actually a bad idea.

Add Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) Vice-Chairman Charlie Munger's name to that list.

Munger recently spoke at the Committee of 100 U.S.-China relations conference (via Farnam Street Blog's Shane Parrish notes and Tim Harford).

The moderator asked Munger a basic question about which sectors Berkshire believes are ripe for growth.

He responded by begging off that question and launched instead into a critique of America's energy policy, especially the continued insistence on independence.

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But unlike other commentators who've refuted the concept, Munger approached the question from a more apocalyptic angle:

Here's Parrish's transcript:

If energy independence was such a good thing, let’s just imagine that we go back to 1930 or something like that and we were hell bent to have total energy independence from all the foreigners. And we just drill and use every technique we can and we produce our hydrocarbon reserves which are absolutely certain to be limited.

Well, by now have way less in reserve and are way less energy independent. In trying to get energy independence we would have destroyed our safety stock of oil within our own borders.

Oil and gas are absolutely certain to become incredibly short and very high priced. And of course the United States has a problem and China has a worse problem.

And China has the correct solution. Imported oil is not your enemy it’s your friend.

Every barrel that you use up that comes from somebody else is a barrel of your precious oil which you’re going to need to feed your people and maintain your civilization.

And what responsible people do with a Confucius ethos is they suffer now to benefit themselves, their families, and their countrymen later. And the way to do that is to go very slow on producing your own (domestic) oil. You want to produce just enough so that you keep up on all of the technology. And don’t mind at all paying prices that look ruinous for foreign oil. It’s going to get way worse later.

Every barrel of foreign oil that you use up instead of using up your own — you’re going to eventually realize you were doing the right thing.

Energy is one of the unique areas, he continued, where free-market policies end up causing more problems than they solve. In the case of energy, he said, governments should step in and encourage imports (it should be noted, of course, that this situation already partially exists, since exporting U.S. crude has been banned since the '70s):