Ethanol is now the fuel of choice in Brazil, while gasoline is the alternative, and one advocate believes that with one simple law passed by Congress the same thing could happen in the United States.
According to Dr. Robert Zubrin, author of “Energy Victory,” who was the keynote speaker at the opening session of the 2008 Fuel Ethanol Workshop Tuesday in Nashville, mandating that all new vehicles sold in the U.S. be flex fuel would effectively break the economic stranglehold the oil cartel has on the country and the world.
Zubrin made his point by using the analogy of a card game where there is a trump suit that defeats all others and the strategy is for your side to hold most the cards in that trump suit. “It’s the same way in energy,” Zubrin said. “There’s four suits, there’s oil, coal, natural gas and biomass. And right now oil is the trump suit.”
That’s because right now there is mainly one way to power vehicles and that is petroleum products. The key is to change that trump suit, he says, and biomass is the best alternative. The question is how to change the trump suit and Zubrin contends that the answer is to mandate the sale of flex fuel vehicles, which would cost at most $100 per vehicle. “If we had a standard that all new cars sold in this country had to be flex fuel, within three years we’d have 50 million cars on the road in the United States capable of running on alternate fuels,” and Zubrin says that would ultimately result in flex fuel vehicles being sold all over the world.
The reason Zubrin is so passionate about this simple idea is because he believes, and can back up with facts, that we are being held hostage by OPEC countries and are funding terrorism by our daily habit of foreign oil. “We have to win,” he says. “Let’s knock ’em flat!”
To find out more about Zubrin’s book “Energy Victory,” go to energyvictory.net.
Listen to Zubrin’s address to the 2008 FEW here – it’s 45 minutes long but guaranteed to fire you up!:
[audio:http://www.zimmcomm.biz/few08/few08-zubrin.mp3]