Top US engineer in piss-off-everybody car fuel solution

Farmers, oil barons, terrorists, Honda: All bastards

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.


…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…

The Register