Design of energy efficient protocols for modern wireless systems has become an important area of research. In this paper, we propose a distributed optimization algorithm for the channel assignment problem for multiple interfering transceiver pairs that cannot communicate with each other. We first modify the auction algorithm for maximal energy efficiency and show that the problem can be solved without explicit message passing using the carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) protocols. We then develop a novel scheme by converting the channel assignment problem into perfect matchings on bipartite graphs. The proposed scheme improves the energy efficiency and does not require any explicit message passing or a shared memory between the users. We derive bounds on the convergence rate and show that the proposed algorithm converges faster than the distributed auction algorithm and achieves near-optimal performance under Rayleigh fading channels. We also present an asymptotic performance analysis of the fast matching algorithm for energy efficient resource allocation and prove the optimality for large enough number of users and number of channels. Finally, we provide numerical assessments that confirm the energy efficiency gains compared to the state of the art.