beej87, I'd like to see any energy budget that shows that it's even CLOSE to as energy efficient to move people one to a car than on a train. The carbon efficiency of trains is definitely far higher, regardless of fuel choice for either vehicle. Electric rail offers vastly less rolling resistance and frontal area by far, as well as easy regenerative braking so the mass of the vehicle matters much less- it's a hands-down winner as a means to move people for the least energy. And on a smog generation basis, public transit wins by a huge margin. Buses? They're more than a little dodgier from an energy efficiency perspective- they don't win unless they're nearly full most of the time, or unless they're electric trolley busses.
Cars are faster, destination to destination, as long as the public purse keeps building and maintaining roads. They're also more convenient, again provided you're not stranded in gridlock that a train could help you to avoid.
Nobody- not individuals or businesses- is going to substantially change the way they consume energy until they have a significant economic driving force to do so. You can't run an energy system on subsidy, so it has to be at least as much stick as carrot to work. I favour carbon taxes rather than cap and trade because they're simpler and less likely to be defrauded or to make the parasitic "financial services class" any richer than they already are. I also favour carbon taxes because the environmental impact of a fossil fuel tends to increase with increasing ratio of carbon to hydrogen. Taxes need to go into dedicated funds rather than general revenue, so that the tax revenue helps fund the switchover to more energy-efficient alternatives. I don't like carbon sequestration- it's too energy consumptive- so I wouldn't give credit for it.
Massive change is needed. Cities built around the car need to densify rather than sprawl further over farmland. Huge investments in buildings, transit, power generation etc. need to be made. But there will be plenty of benefits which come along with kicking the fossil monkey off our backs. We won't eliminate fossil fuels use ever- but we will deter the purely wasteful portion of it if we ever get the political will to give it a serious try.
Is gas part of the transition? Definitely. It's finite but it's also hard to use for transport, so stationary uses make far more sense than wasting most of it in an attempt to convert it to liquid fuels or even crazier, hydrogen as a vehicle fuel. The same goes for woody biomass- dumb to make liquid fuels out of it, when it's a perfectly good solid fuel we've been using for millenia.
