The 2007 average price was $72 per barrel and the current average is sitting at a healthy $94 per barrel. Between 2004-2005 the oil prices started to go through the roof and we’re not exactly dropping into an affordable range even with a big drop last week. He was previously cool to the idea of alternative fuels but is now seeing that without alternative fuels, the transfer of wealth out of the country will be significant.

“We’re spending about $1.5 billion a day — $500 to $600 billion a year — on imported oil,” he noted. “That’s four times the cost of the Iraqi war. We can’t continue to do that. In 10 years you will have transferred wealth from the United States to the producing countries of about $5 or $6 trillion. That won’t work. I’m not sure what it’s going to do to us to remove that much wealth out of this country. We have got to get on alternative fuels in the United States. That’s all there is to it.”