[NOTE: Click the link to the right to hear an audio recording of this event. You can watch streaming video of this event on C-SPAN's Book TV website.]

Every day, our fuel dollars are being sent to countries that fund terrorism -- and it doesn't have to be that way. The billions we pay at the pumps for overpriced gasoline are supporting Islamist terror by enriching its Saudi financiers, not to mention underwriting Iran's nuclear program. But the proposals usually put forward to free America from its dependence on imported oil are unrealistic, both technically and politically.

In this evening lecture at EPPC, Robert Zubrin will explain the plan he offers in his new book Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil. He argues that if Congress passed a law requiring that all new cars sold in the United States be flexible-fueled -- that is, able to run on any combination of gasoline or alcohol fuels -- the control that the OPEC oil cartel has maintained on the world's transportation fuel supply would be crippled. Within three years of enactment, 50 million cars capable of running on high-alcohol fuels could be on U.S. roads, and at least an equal number overseas, bringing an end to oil-price extortion by opening the fuel market to competition from ethanol and methanol produced by farmers and others worldwide.

Robert Zubrin is a contributing editor to EPPC's journal The New Atlantis. He is the president of Pioneer Astronautics, an aerospace engineering R&D firm, and also leads the Mars Society, an international organization dedicated to furthering space exploration. For many years, he worked as a senior engineer for Lockheed Martin. He holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering, and has nine U.S. patents granted or pending. In addition, he is the author of the critically acclaimed nonfiction books The Case for Mars, Entering Space, and Mars on Earth; the science fiction novels The Holy Land and First Landing; and articles in Scientific American, The New Atlantis, American Enterprise, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.