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An American aerospace engineer and tech author has written a book suggesting that America - and with it the rich West - should free itself from dependence on oil, as oil money is the primary driver behind jihadi extremism.

Robert Zubrin has an impressive panoply of technical credentials. His first degree was in maths and he holds an aerospace masters degree, plus another masters and a doctorate in nuclear engineering. He spent seven years working on space propulsion at Lockheed, and now runs his own company, Pioneer Astronautics, which does tech studies for the US space programme.

Frustrated, Washington deliberately mistreats the American refugees displaced by the Minervans, forcing them to live in camps near the Minervan enclave as a propaganda opportunity. Then the President sponsors deniable terrorist attacks on both the Minervan aliens and the offworld Western Galactic Empire. The American terror campaign is funded largely by offworld revenue from an advanced energy source - much prized by the aliens - which has been discovered elsewhere in the States. (Geddit?)

Now Dr Zubrin has expanded on the themes addressed in The Holy Land in his new book, Energy Victory. He has already written up his thoughts around the issue in articles at The New Atlantis, an online tech-issues mag put out by the Ethics and Public Policy Center - "Washington DC's premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy".

In essence, Zubrin says that the OPEC oil cartel - and in particular its heaviest hitters, the Saudi royal house - are no friends of the wealthy liberal West, nor the downtrodden poor of the Third World. He argues that OPEC's production quotas keep the price of oil far higher than the free-market price and far and away higher than the costs of production. This channels colossal sums of hard currency into the hands of inimical governments...

Saudi Arabia is the primary global financier of the Islamist terror cult. Until the Saudis started racking up billions in inflated oil revenues in the 1970s, the Wahhabi movement was regarded by Muslims the world over as little more than primitive insanity... it is the Saudis’ unlimited funds — over $200 billion in foreign exchange earnings in 2006 — that have allowed them to buy up the faculties of the Islamic world’s leading intellectual centers; to build or take over thousands of mosques; to establish thousands of radical madrassas, pay their instructors, and provide the free daily meals necessary to entice legions of poor village boys to attend. Those boys are indoctrinated with the idea that the way to get into paradise is to murder Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, and Hindus (not to mention moderate Muslims)... We have been subsidizing a war against ourselves.

Iran is now using its petroleum lucre to fund its nuclear program and to insulate itself from economic sanctions imposed on it... This is one of the gravest threats to international peace and stability — and, again, we are paying for it ourselves with oil revenue.

So us Westerners need to kick the oil habit, not particularly because of global warming or pollution, but for the simple reason that 90 per cent or better of the money we pay for it gets skimmed by unpleasant zealots and used to radicalise peaceable Muslims into a war on the free West. The high prices that allow this massive skim, meanwhile, serve to cripple Third World economies as they are unable to afford the transport and energy which would let them grow.

Zubrin's solution, perhaps strangely for an engineer with a deep background in nuclear power systems*, does not involve hydrogen. Indeed he pours scorn on "new energy charlatans" who peddle the "hydrogen hoax".

It’s all pure bunk. To get serious about energy policy, America needs to abandon, once and for all, the false promise of the hydrogen age... Hydrogen, therefore, is not a source of energy. It simply is a carrier of energy... an extremely poor one.

OK then, no hydrogen cars. (Honda will be really cheesed off.) So what does Zubrin advocate?

In short, alcohol fuel. Bio-fuel, then?

Some reviewers of Energy Victory think so. Economics prof Louis Putterman says that Zubrin "argues provocatively for a bio-fuel based approach".

In fact Zubrin doesn't, quite; or not bio-fuel as currently understood anyway. He certainly isn't in favour of powering American transport on corn ethanol produced by (1) heavily subsidised and protected Midwestern farmers, or (2) robbing food from starving foreigners.

Zubrin notes that making ethanol - booze alcohol - out of human-edible food is expensive and problematic, becuase people like to eat and drink it. He thinks that one day we'll learn how to make fuel out of inedible (to us) biomass cellulose, but freely admits that it can't be done yet.

Should the price of oil drop... some combination of tariffs, subsidies, or preferential taxes would be required to keep crop-fermentation ethanol competitive... research is currently underway... to transform cellulose into a starch or sugar, which would thus be fermentable... this should be possible, because grazing animals such as horses, deer, and cattle perform this trick in their stomachs all the time... cellulosic ethanol technology appears highly probable, but we don’t have it yet.

Instead, Zubrin holds up the idea of using methanol - wood alcohol. As its traditional name implies, you can make it out of the inedible bits of plants. You can also, of course, make it from coal - and America has an awful lot of coal. According to Zubrin, you can make methanol out of "used candy wrappers, plastic forks, or Styrofoam coffee cups" too.

Why aren't we doing it already, then?

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