General: High Price of Gas

Without abundant sources of hydrogen, moving over would just swap one problem for another. Producing hydrogen requires fossil fuels (with current electricity production being mostly fossil fuel based). And since the planet is on a knife-edge when it comes to electrical power (especially the UK, where our generator capacity is rapidly approaching saturation and a number of older stations are nearing, at or even passed their decommission dates and don't have replacements in place) the added strain of producing our fuels is not currently feasible.

What we need is to build more nuclear power plants. Yes, I know the ecomentalists will rant on about Chernobyl, but the truth is that modern nuclear facilities are clean, efficient and can be set up to reprocess and then re-use their own spent fuel (and the spent fuels of past nuclear facilities that everyone worries about because they're in underground bunkers everyone thinks are leaking). The Magnox reactors us brits built in the 50's/60's were such a safe design (due to a deliberately slower reaction taking place in the reactor) that a meltdown was actually pretty hard to achieve (theoretically - no-one ever tried). Modern reactors are nearly 50% more efficient than those reactors, too.

Wind power is a bust because it costs so much to build a wind turbine that it hasn't paid for itself by the time it comes to decommission it unless you triple the cost of electricity. In which case it'll break even (roughly). Solar power is a similar story, iirc.

The only cheap, clean way to produce power in abundance is nuclear. If we all built our own homebrew wind turbines and connected them to the national grid via grid tie inverters, maybe we could then do wind power cheaply and efficiently (backed up with nuclear for high current draw periods and low wind periods, and/or hydrogen production facilities with fuel cells to act as giant capacitors).

I'm pretty sure I said all this to Pete about 3 years ago (actually, some of this stuff is probably gleaned from him).

As for bio-fuels, bio-ethanol requires 75% (iirc) of the energy it has available to be used in it's production, so you only gain 25%. Biodiesel requires methanol (no idea how efficient the production process actually is, and it can be done in many variations - filtered, unfiltered, washed, unwashed, heated, unheated - and any combination thereof) and veg oil (old waste veg oil can be used - probably the most environmentally friendly of the options).

The cost of grain has already shot up because of biofuel production. Add to that moving the grains and oils and food around requires oil - so by this time next year, you'll be worried how you can afford your weekly shop, as well as how to pay to get you to the shop and the shopping home.

And I'm not sure biofuels are actually environmentally friendly since fossil fuels are used to power the production process.

Roll on cold fusion powered flying cars.