A reader writes:

The folks at MIT apparently live in a cave, as it’s pretty well known that the Iraq hawks/neocons have been on the energy independence bandwagon for years. According to that bastion of right-wing nuttery, Slate Magazine, in an article over two years old, James Woolsey drives a Prius. Frank Gaffney is downright Al Gorian in stumping for biofuels. Heck, the Slate article is titled “Neocons who drive Priuses“.

As I read Messrs Gaffney and Woolsey, they’re not in the business of peripheral self-denying gestures that reduce American consumption for its own sake but of transformative measures that reduce permanently the value of oil to its most malign producers.

As I say in America Alone, oil revenues are a form of jizya the Saudis levy on infidels around the planet. It enables them to buy friends everywhere they need them, including in America, where they pretty much own everyone worth owning.