| There are no good energy alternatives out there right now.
Ethanol is a joke. It takes more than gallon of gasoline to produce a gallon of ethanol. And there are huge problems with the sourcing of the bio fuel to make ethanol. The most efficient is switchgrass, but even if you were to replace all the fields that we currently farm with switchgrass it still wouldn't even come close satsifying the oil needs of cars alone. Corn is cheap, but it's cheap because it's heavily subsidized. And if there is more demand for corn, then the price of corn will rise. You may think you don't eat a lot of corn, but you do. Any processed food you eat probably has corn by products in it. Corn is fed to cattle for beef. It's broken down into its sugars for artificial sweeteners. Increasing ethanol reliance increases food costs indirectly.
Solar energy currently provides 1/10 of 1% of our energy and requires huge amounts of space in addition to its incredibly high price. And I'm not even going to mention how ridiculously toxic it is to produce and dispose of.
Hybrid cars are a good short-term patch. But they aren't going to help much long-term.
Electric cars aren't any better for the environment. Electricity in the US is largely generated by coal which is worse for the environment than gasoline. The plus side to having an electric car is that it shifts the burden of cleaning up from the consumer to the producer.
Hydrogen fails for the same reason. There are no good ways to mass produce hydrogen other than by electrolysis. And the way they get the electricity for that is from coal. Hydrogen also has signficant issues as far as packaging, transportation and distribution. Too much to list here.
Wind farms are good, but nobody wants them in eye sight (personally I think they look cool). You put them out in the middle of nowhere and you lose too much electricity in the transmission. There are safety concerns about birds that I don't really buy, but they also affect the weather beneath the them.
Nuclear is one of the best options scarily enough. It can produce the large amounts of energy needed. And coal exhaust is actually more radioactive than nuclear powerplants. Obviously, there are huge issues with nuclear. First, they have to be close to population centers in order to be efficient (transmission losses) and that raises the second issue of any meltdown or leak would put significant number of people in danger. Lastly, no one knows what to do with the waste.
There are two things to bear in mind when it comes to oil prices.
1) Oil used in cars is maybe a quarter of our oil consumption, so any long-term solution has to address the other markets that use petrochemicals (like plastics)
2) High prices of oil also raise prices in foodstuffs. The average piece of food travels 1400 miles to get to you. Some of that is by rail, but a lot is by delivery truck or plane. Gas guzzlers. The same goes for just about any product in today's society, but food as a necessity I list here. You probably don't know it, but FedEx and UPS have a clause in their shipping agreements where they can charge a 'high gas cost' surcharge for short times of high prices to help compensate for costs. Unfortunately, both companies have been charging this surcharge since 2005.
Increases in oil prices hurt the poor most because the relative increase in pump price hurts them porportionally more as does the increase in food price.
What's terrifying is that oil is not something that is going to get less needed. India and China are getting thirsty and they have far more people than we do. China is already investing heavily in Africa and even in East Europe. They even tried to buy a US oil company last year. You may have your doubts about whether the Iraq war was over oil, but believe me the next war will be. | 
