Bold in its Vision, the "Set America Free" report asserted that a plug-in hybrid with a 100-km-range battery could cut fuel consumption by 85 percent and that conventional cars could be converted to run on alternative fuels with the addition of control chips and fuel-line modifications costing less than US $100. Combining advanced plug-in and flexible-fuel features could ultimately yield a vehicle capable of going 100 km on a mere 0.47 liter of gasoline (500 mi/gal), the report claimed.

The environmentalists and security-minded luminaries behind the report, such as Frank Gaffney, a senior defense official in Ronald Reagan's administration, and R. James Woolsey, the hawkish director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency during President Bill Clinton's first administration, urged Bush to commit $1 billion over the next five years to the establishment of a domestic alternative fuels industry. In addition, they said, the federal government should implement tax credits and other incentives "to encourage rapid production and consumer purchase of advanced vehicles like hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and flexible-fuel vehicles" and to produce "more efficient vehicles across all models."

Eyeing the draft comprehensive energy bill, which once again is wending its way through the U.S. Congress after being stalled for two years, signers of the report are hoping that its points about hybrids and alternative fuels will make it into the final version. "There's very little doubt in my mind that these sorts of steps will be taken at some point," says Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. "The question is [do we take them] after we have realized the very unpleasant national security crisis that we're forecasting, or do we do it in advance of that."

Gaffney referred to what the report called a "perfect storm" of circumstances requiring that "we effect over the next four years a dramatic reduction in the quantities of oil imported from unstable and hostile regions of the world." Other report signers include a Reagan national security adviser and a Clinton chief of staff.