I'm all for a "New Deal II" and to me it looks like McCain's Lexington Project may fit the bill. I believe America is full of people with good ideas, we just need to figure out which ones are the best. Every scientist was telling us about a year into the ethanol debacle that it was a net loss in production... the writing was on the wall if you were willing to look... but the political machine had it's shining solution so we as a nation plowed ahead with a solution doomed to failure. I think the only solution is to look broadscope for solutions. Have you seen compressed air cars? freakin good idea. The problem with plug in cars is it just shifts energy demards to the grid, which is fine if you have spare grid capacity but we really don't. I think the other misconception is that we all have to change to the same power source at the same time. We could easily have infrastructure for compressed air cars, hydrogen cars, plugin hybrids, traditional hybrids, and traditional gas vehicles on the road at the same time. And if we're going to place a greater demand on the grid we have to build new power plants, the political environment has changed such that creating new dams for hydro power is probably environmentally non-pc, nuclear power is difficult to secure support for, though third and fourth generation reactors are a much better alternative to using 40 year old reactors to provide 20% of our power supply. If we're capable of building more nuclear plants, we need to start reprocessing the fuels such that we aren't filling up a yucca every two years. Regardless of the long term solution, the stop gap measure is drill here, there and everywhere, and regulate speculation somewhat. And develop technology to extract oil from oil shale as the united states has 3-5 times the oil reserves of the Saudi's lock in oil shale in CO, WY, ID, where basically no one lives anyway.