Oh, I am all for another source of energy, of course. The energy sources for mobile transportation are that much more difficult to implement. Windmills aren't going to do it -- not even for traditional uses. They will, if 100% successful, alleviate about 2% of our current gasoline and/or coal consumption.
Just making electric cars doesn't do it either. You've got to look at the whole system. The system includes everything from the generation of electricity (always from something else since we can't reliably collect and store lightening), to the manufacture, use, and disposal of the car. If you make a car run on electricity, and the electricity demand goes way up, as it will, and your power plant belches that much more soot and filth into the atmosphere, did you really save anything by allegedly "going green"?
Let's say we had the ideal source of energy today, in the quantities that we need. Everything's better -- cleaner, cheap, people buying cars want this new fuel because the cars actually perform better with more horsepower -- you get the idea. It will still take quite a while to get universally adopted as the car market is such where most people have to save a while to afford a new car, and cars, unlike computers for example, are normally not retrofitted with new hardware.
It's going to take time. The discovery of the really big thing needs to come first, and the government cannot do that by decree. The creativity of the freedom-loving individual, like another Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie or equivalent is where it starts. Until then, we need to perfect the techniques for the extraction of oil to drive the probability of this kind of event to as close to zero as we can get it. But when push comes to shove, we are going to get that oil -- until oil itself is obsolete as a fuel.
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