Fuel
I’ve bought into the flex fuel idear. Check out the Zubrin PowerPoint presentation here..
As a libertarian, I don’t like to have the government mandate anything, but I see this as a national security issue which is firmly within the province of the executive and legislative branch.
I am not a scientist or an economist. Someone who took a class or two in those subjects can give me the unintended consequences of Dr. Zubrin’s plan in the comments.
UPDATE: John McCain is seeming like a fiscal conservative and copying my conversion.
The Corcoran Brothers 
Forcing a rule through like that with no planning on the back end is likely to lead to trouble. Sure, the Powerpoint makes it look so easy, and look, there’s an aerial view of uncultivated farmland just going to waste! I wish I had time to dig through that one stats slide, I am sure there are some holes in there.
Regardless of what the slides say, corn costs have gone up with our dedication to producing ethanol from corn. This is impacting people that depend on corn as a food. You think you can just mandate flex fuel and the market will just “work itself out”? There’s also this story (there’s a link to the report in there) about how the demand for biofuel is fueling (ha ha) a desire to farm all kinds of ethanol-bearing plants, many of them, unfortunately, invasive species.
And what about jets, trucks, trains shipping products across the country? This site seems to indicate jet + train+ bus + trucks = a signficant portion of our fuel consumption. When cost of transporting goods go up, the prices we pay go up. I don’t see how Zubrin is going to fix that part of the problem. I don’t see at all how we can fix this by consuming *more*!
Also, why ethanol/methanol? Why not solar? Or electric?