I agree that playing the blame game isn't solving anything. . . unfortunately, that seems to be the way the US works. . . fix the blame, not the problem.
as for using up the oil faster, I'll have to disagree on that; there are some things that oil is the best answer for (chemical feedstocks) that enable RE; things like FRP and carbon fiber. the trick is to use the oil for the correct purposes.
My solution: turn the current tax structure around. Instead of offering tax breaks on renewable energy and conservation prorgams, tax the things that are REALLY BAD at a much higher rate. Do it right up front, and be merciless about it. then, if someone could show that the resource-intensive, high-tax option was the only one that would solve a given problem, then THEY can do all the tax-break paperwork.
yes, this is a punitive tax; that's the whole point. no, I don't think voters would voluntarily triple the tax on SUVs sprawling parking lots (in place of multi-level garages) and lawn care products. But proposing it might get people to thinking a bit. (ok, so I'm an optimist)
there are plenty of reasons to get out of the gravity well, too- energy might be one of them, though I'm not sanguine about ever beaming energy back to earth as a cost-competitive solution. Also, doing so would 'widen' earth's energy capture profile vis a vis the sun, and would actually contribute to global climate change by bringing in more energy to drive weather systems. But, if we use the energy at point of generation to refine materials that are already present in space (metalloids, electronics, etc) we could gain a lot of the benefits of space power without having to beam it back to be squandered. . . there are plenty of other things to do in orbit (weather solar or earth orbit) that COULD help earthbound problems at a tidy profit: as an example, one of the problems with current fuelcell technologies is the acute shortage of platnium and pallidium. Both elements are (relatively) abundant in samples of metallic meteorites, and can be assumed to be abundant on asteroids. (we should verify that . . . let's skip the moon and mars (just more resource-limited gravity wells) and go out there instead! or to places that we KNOW have useful materials- Europa (water), Titan (hydrocarbons), etc.) the same arguements apply to gold, silver and copper; I once read that if we were to take up asteroid mining, its entirely possible that gold would wind up being effectively just another industrial metal like copper.
too, living in space would teach us a lot about closed-cycle environments and limited resource agriculture. . . . not a bad thing, no matter what else we learned out there.
again, just my 20 millidollars.
-Dan