Last week, President Obama announced his “bold, new” goal to reduce America’s oil imports by one-third by 2025. While many critics have rightly objected that the administration offered no program of action to actually achieve that goal, there is a bigger problem. The goal itself is inadequate.

Obama wants to reduce oil imports by 33 percent in 14 years. But oil prices have risen by 44 percent in the past 14 fortnights, and 900 percent in the past twelve years. In 1999, Americans paid $90 billion for all their oil, less than 5 percent of what they paid in federal taxes. At current prices of $108 per barrel, Americans this year will pay over $800 billion for oil, an amount equal to 33 percent of all federal tax revenues, with two thirds of the take going to fill the coffers of foreign regimes. If current trends continue, there is every prospect that oil prices will more than triple by Obama’s 2025 target date, leaving us paying more for oil than we pay to the federal government.

In other words, the Obama plan is a strategy whose stated goal entails the total defeat of the United States in the energy war.

The likely impact of the Obama administration’s surrender to continued petroleum extortion can be predicted by looking at the effects of the oil-price hikes we have suffered for the past four decades, including those in 1973, 1979, 1991, 2001, and 2008. Each oil-price rise has been followed by a sharp rise in American unemployment.

The distress to American workers caused by such events is manifest, but the economic damage goes far beyond the impact on the unemployed themselves. A sustained oil price of $100 per barrel will add $520 billion to the U.S. balance-of-trade deficit. Furthermore, there is a direct and well-established relationship between unemployment rates and rates of mortgage defaults. Thus the $130-per-barrel oil shock of 2008 didn’t just throw 5 million Americans out of work, it made many of them default on their home payments, and thus helped destroy the value of the mortgage-backed securities held by America’s banks. This, in turn, threatened a general collapse of the financial system, with a bailout bill for $800 billion sent to the taxpayers as a result. But that is not all. The destruction of spending power of the unemployed and the draining of funds from everyone else to meet the direct and indirect costs of high oil prices reduce consumer demand for products of every type, thereby wrecking retail sales and the industries that depend upon them. And as the economy goes down, so do federal tax revenues, thereby exploding the national deficit.

This wrecking operation on our economy is being perpetuated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a cartel of tyrannies and kleptocracies largely hostile or indifferent to the prosperity of the industrialized West. This cartel, which controls 80 percent of the world’s commercially viable oil reserves, is currently limiting its production to 1973 levels — despite a doubling of the size of the world economy in the nearly four decades since. As a result, we and our allies are having our economies looted as oil prices go through the roof, with even worse consequences falling upon the world’s poorest. An oil impost that causes depression in the advanced world can cause starvation in the Third World.

We need to break free of the extortions of this cartel. The only way to do that is to enable our economy to run on low-cost fuels whose production does not depend on resources under OPEC’s control.

Fortunately, such a fuel is available. It’s called methanol, or wood alcohol. It’s a major chemical commodity that can currently be produced in quantity from natural gas, coal, recycled garbage, or any kind of biomass without exception. The cost of production of methanol is about $0.60 per gallon, and its current spot price is $1.20 per gallon, without any subsidy — equivalent in miles per dollar to gasoline at $2.18 per gallon. While not drinkable like ethanol, methanol lacks the carcinogens contained in gasoline, burns cleaner, and is safer to handle — in fact, windshield-wiper fluid is one-third methanol. It is also less likely to cause a dangerous fire in the event of a crash. In short, methanol is cheap, clean, safe, and readily producible from resources that are widely available both here and around the world.

The only problem is that the cars on the road today can’t use it. But this can be readily fixed.

Flex-fuel vehicles can be now be made, at an incremental cost of only about $100 per car, that can run equally well on methanol, ethanol, or gasoline, in any combination, thereby giving the consumer complete fuel choice.

Were Congress to pass a law requiring that all new cars sold in the U.S. be fully flex fueled, it would change not merely the American auto fleet, but the global auto fleet, as foreign car makers would be compelled to switch their lines over to meet the standard. Thus Japanese cars sold in Japan, China, and India would also be flex fueled, as would Korean and European cars marketed worldwide. If we make flex fuel the American standard, it will become the effectively the international standard.

This would solve the chicken-and-egg problem that has prevented the creation of a competitive fuel market worldwide. Without large numbers of methanol-capable cars, there is no incentive to install methanol pumps. Without methanol pumps, there is no incentive for consumers to buy methanol-capable cars. But if we require flex-fuel capability for new cars, the invisible hand will be unchained and the pumps will appear.

Gasoline, methanol, and ethanol would then be forced to compete at the pump, thereby putting a permanent competitive constraint on the price of petroleum at about the $50-per-barrel level. As the market for methanol expanded, investment funds would flow into research on cheaper ways to produce it, driving the global price for liquid fuels down even further over time.

This would completely break the power of OPEC to limit the availability or control the price of global liquid-fuel supplies, and insure our economy against disruption when the inherently unstable regimes that compose the cartel ultimately met their fate.

In the last Congress, a bipartisan bill that incorporated such a provision, the Open Fuel Standards Act, was introduced into both the House and the Senate. As a critical national- and economic-security measure, it needs to be introduced again, and this time brought to a vote and passed.

America needs an energy policy designed to bring it victory and prosperity, not depression and defeat. The Obama administration’s strategy fails that test. It’s time for Congress to act.

— Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Astronautics, an aerospace-engineering company based in Lakewood, Colo., and the author of Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil.