Bud McFarlane writes:
Today we are spending more than $300 billion annually to purchase foreign oil. It is well known that some of that money is passed on to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Indeed, it is fair to say that we are funding both sides in this war.
We spend $500 billion each year on our military forces. One of their most vital missions is to protect the flow of Persian Gulf oil which fuels the global economy. The disruption of those oil flows — such as by terrorists disabling a major Saudi processing terminal — would bring down economies throughout the industrialized world.
Here again, one can conceive a strategy for neutralizing this threat. It involves moving urgently to introduce a profoundly different national energy policy designed to [...] provide market-based incentives to justify the essential re-tooling of our automobile industry to enable it to produce flexible-fuel, plug-in hybrid electric cars and trucks, using carbon composite materials (as Boeing is doing in the new 787 airliner);