If Obama moves to retrofit, he will discover millions of vehicles operating in more than 28,000 public and private fleets. This includes about 220,000 postal vehicles and about 100,000 trucks at U.P.S. The nation’s taxi fleet, 100,000 strong, experiences a 100 percent turnover every three years. By immediately requiring fleet purchases to be alternative fuel and propulsion, energy experts believe manufacturers will see a mad scramble to fill orders. An entire army of unemployed autoworkers and cash-starved fleet managers stand ready to participate in a national upfit. Obama can give birth to a whole economic sector, assert people like Rich Kolodziej, president of Natural Gas Vehicles America, who backs eliminating the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

In addition, starting immediately, Obama must insist that all vehicles become multifuel vehicles. Proposed bipartisan legislation for an Open Fuel Standard would require half of all cars to be multifuel by 2012. But many feel this is too distant a goal. It must be done now, they argue. And it can be for $100 to $200 per vehicle if Obama will require Detroit to do so as part of any continuing bailout, asserts Luft, of the Set America Free Coalition. Again, Obama could well give birth to an economic sector.

Open Fuel, combined with Obama administration efforts, can immediately stimulate alternative fuel production. Contrary to automaker protestations, neither compressed natural gas (C.N.G.) nor hydrogen needs a neighborhood gas station infrastructure. Home or office refueling devices, such as those now under the control of Honda but not widely sold and in some cases kept off the market, will convert ordinary household oven gas to C.N.G. fuel. The Honda Home Energy Center can convert household natural gas to hydrogen for cars.  Obama’s administration needs to acquire the independent expertise to see this obvious fix and get it deployed, according to hydrogen and C.N.G. advocates such as Martin Barillas,  editor of Energy Publisher.  He says, “I was driving a C.N.G. car 25 years ago in Guatemala with no neighborhood filling stations, just home fueling." In this vein, alt-fuel advocates suggest that patents not being acted upon must be seized and put to public use in a so-called “compulsory license.” The wartime precedents for Obama to consult regarding this type of intervention are ample.

However, many feel that any intelligent vehicle design and production and the required alternative fuel supply will never happen unless Obama appoints a Car Czar to invasively intervene in auto-propulsion specifics. Everything—from the size of the gas tank neck to the thickness of dashboard padding—is government-mandated. For decades, Detroit has chosen the wrong cars to produce for U.S. security, a chorus of auto industry critics asserts. Every vehicle now has a national security profile defined by how much gasoline it consumes—a point made recently at a meeting of the Western Automotive Journalists. Obama’s Car Czar—says Marc Rauch, co-publisher of TheAutoChannel.com, an online automobile resource must try to bring sense not only to emissions and bumper strength, but also to oil dependency. Such a Car Czar will need bailout veto power as vibrant as the Secretary of the Treasury now wields on Wall Street.

Obama needs to launch the crash energy fix everyone has called for, headed by a military man or scientist impervious to lobbyists and all of the conflicting special-interest groups. Unless they’re excluded, Rauch and others argue, nothing will be accomplished except more empty rhetoric and impotent compromises.

The nation’s 44th president must act at breakneck speed, implementing the best available options today and better ones tomorrow. That requires a descent from the clouds of campaign rhetoric to where the rubber meets the road. If Obama fails the reality oil check, then America will continue to descend into its well-constructed oil demise. Then the only “change” the nation will see is change for the worse.

Edwin Black is the New York Times best selling investigative author of IBM and the Holocaust, Internal Combustion and his just released book, The Plan: How to Save America When the Oil Stops—or the Day Before (Dialog Press). He can be reached at www.edwinblack.com.