A good sumary of where we stand in the energy question by Richard Smalley, 1996 nobel price winner and professor of chemistry and physics at Rice university.
In the latter part of the article he talks about his vision of the "solution".
The terawatt challenge
The article is too long to paste in full, I'll paste a few interesting passages below.
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Problem 2: Peaks in Oil Production
Another charge to keep that should be at
the top of the president’s list is the assurance
of abundant, low-cost energy for us
and our posterity. We are used to living in
a world where energy is cheap, and most
of that energy was produced right here in
the United States. The majority of our oil
came from Texas, which was once the premier
oil producer in the world and is still
the center of the world’s oil and gas businesses.
Yet, as far back as 1970, we peaked
in the amount of oil we could produce in
this country. Even though we still think of
Texas as the land of people getting crazyrich
discovering oil in their back yard, in
fact Texas has been a net importer of energy
for over a decade now, with billions of
energy dollars a year going out of the state.
Saudi Arabia and the Middle East are now
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Oil, along with gas, is tremendously
important. The history of oil is basically
the history of modern civilization as we
have known it for the past 100 years. As
our principal transportation fuel, oil has
been the basis of our country’s power
and prosperity. What will we do when
there is no longer enough oil and gas?
We do not yet have an answer.
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Energy is not just “any old issue.” Most
people, in fact, understand its importance
very well. When I have given talks on
this subject before, I have often asked
people in the audience to name the most
critical problems we will have to confront
as we go through this century. In every
case, after a bit of discussion, the audiences
have agreed that energy is the single
most important issue we face.
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Getting there will be incredibly difficult.
If we knew today how to transform the
makeup of our energy mix by exploiting
fission/fusion, solar, or wind, it would
take an inordinate amount of time. If I
could go out tomorrow and turn on the
switch of a new power plant that would
produce a thousand megawatts of power
from some new, clean, carbon-free energy
source, I would have to turn on a new
plant every day for 27 years before I generated
even 10 terawatts of new power.
Ten terawatts plus 14 terawatts does not
add up to even half of the 60 terawatts we
will eventually need. Of course, we do not
currently have the technology to build a
fleet of nuclear fission breeder reactors—
let alone a solar or geothermal plant—that
could produce that amount of energy
cheaply. I believe that if we do not find a
way to build such power plants over the
next decade, or at most two, this 21st century
is going to be very unpleasant.
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More to be found in the article, it's about 6 pages long and very worthwhile, especially if you are somewhat new to these issues.