Alternative energy seems to be on every person's mind these days, there is a lot of talk about hydrogen energy as being the next energy source; however that process still takes more energy to produce for the return energy you get back. This is where Ethanol and Flex Fuel cars come in.



Recently Robert Zubrin spoke about his plan to achieve American energy independence by mandating that all new cars be "Flex Fuel" compliant by 2009. Flex fuel vehicles can run on either gasoline or fuels such as methanol and ethanol. Such a plan would be a an amazing boom to the US economy, creating a huge market for farmers to grow crops such as corn and sugar (used to make ethanol) as well as decreasing America's reliance on foreign oil, he put forth.

There are about 2% of cars in The United States that are currently supporting Flex Fuel, however the lack of ethanol is prohibiting the general public to use this on a mass scale, even though the current gas station infrastructure can be used for pumping normal fuel and alcohol based fuel. You can see which cars support E85 Ethanol fuel right here

With there being huge surplus of corn on the market this would be a huge boost to the American economy, producing oil right in our backyard. In turn this would reduce political stress over oil fields in the middle east and get us a step closer to a self sustained country.
While Senator Harkin has introduced flex fuel legislation, Zubrin believes its planned implementation is too slow, and that concerned citizens should write their Representatives and Senators to push for quicker action. For more on this topic, see his article published by The American Enterprise.

You can read an article on this legislation here.

We were able to find a clip of the show and we encourage you to listen to the whole episode at coast to coast am. You can hear a part of it here, for a full episode goto coasttocoastam.com.