We as world leaders need to migrate to renewable power sources such as solar, wind, wave, geothermal, and hydroelectric as first tier sources for the power grid.

While these are developing we will need to use clean coal to continue producing power for the grid. We have enough coal to last 400 years according to some estimates.

One of the most interesting ways to reduce the CO2 signature of the coal plants was proposed by a group at MIT. They used CO2 hungry algea to scrub out the CO2. The algae are latter harvested and oil is produced from the algae and used to produce Biodiesel. While biodiesel and diesel will be needed for sometime it has been determined that clean diesel and biodiesel are an improvement over the older diesel products. Biodiesle can also be produced from vegetable oils and waste cooking oil.

Agriculture is realing form price increases caused by the increase in using corn crops to produce ethanol for automobile fuel additives. But this chaos will only last as long as auto producers refuse to market electric cars. Hybrids are only a stop gap. Electric cars will drive more of the energy requirements to the power grid, a place were we can use renewable energy.

Then there is hydrogen power. It can be used two ways.
First hydrogen can be produced from the electrolysis of water into H2 and O2. Hydrogen is then run over a fuel cell to produce electricity and water. This system would be most effective if excess electricity produced for the grid were used to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen is then stored until needed during peak usage to keep from having to bring a coal or gas fired plants back on line.

The second way to use Hydrogen is to fuel automobiles, trucks, planes, and trains as well as powering homes and office buildings.

But I digress H2 is a topic for a later date.

We could easily intoduce massive solar and wind farms to replace coal, gas, and oil fired power plants. We could all easily be dirving electric cars if just the government, oil companies, and auto industry would cooperated and give the public the products needed to get off of fossil fuels.

It will not last 100 years unless we use the alternatives.

Most experts agree that we are currently into peak production, meaning we are basically depleating our usable oil reserves.

There is a large amount of shale oil, but at this time with all the advanced technology, it still costs more energy to drill it than it produces.

There are many practical other means of energy resources, but the average consumer must start to demand them.