From various sources is a plan by Robert Zubrin to break the OPEC cartel for $100 per car.
What is needed is for the Congress to pass a law requiring that all new cars sold in the United States be flex-fueled - able to run on any combination of alcohol or gasoline fuel. Such cars are existing technology - in fact about 24 different models of flex-fuel cars were produced by the Detroit Big Three in 2007, and they only cost about $100 more than the same car in a gasoline-only version. But, since alcohol fuel pumps (such as E85, a fuel mix that is 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline) are nearly as rare as unicorns, flex-fuel cars only command about 3 percent of the new-car market.The reason E85 pumps are so rare is that gas station owners don't want to dedicate one of their pumps to a kind of fuel that only a few percent of the cars can use. If we had a flex-fuel requirement, however, then within three years of enactment there would be 50 million cars on the road capable of running on high-alcohol fuels. Under those conditions, E85 and M50 (a 50 percent methanol, 50 percent gasoline fuel mix; flex-fuel cars can use any alcohol, including methanol) pumps would start appearing everywhere.
But most important, this would not just be happening here. By requiring that all new cars sold in the United States be flex-fueled, we would be forcing all the foreign car manufacturers to switch their lines to flex-fuel as well, effectively making flex-fuel the international standard. So there would be hundreds of millions of cars worldwide capable of running on alcohol, forcing gasoline to compete everywhere against alcohol fuels that can be produced from numerous sources. This would effectively break the vertical monopoly that the oil cartel currently holds on the world's fuel supply and keep prices in the $50-a-barrel range, because that is where alcohol fuels become competitive.
I'm not in favor of government regulation to further social agendas, but this economic manipulation would be to enhance national security. Seems like a valid use of government power that both Lefties and Righties could support.