Government picks winners and losers. It's crony capitalism and leads to excesses like we've seen on Wall Street where gains are privitized and losses are socialized. I say let the best technology win, with no subsidies.
This is true to a point. But, when you need the infrastructure - you make an educated guess, invest in it, and let it go from there. The Utopian dream of "do nothing, the market will figure it out" has shown itself to be just as bad as over-regulation - either by the creation of troll bridges protected by interested parties or by not having enough long-term investment to bring you to a place where you can stand on the shoulders of giants to continue and invent.
In this case, it is pretty clear that oil is a resource that is unlikely to get cheaper. So you have to invest in alternative options and let them, within reason based on acceptable infrastructure, fight it out. The cool thing is that if for some reason we find ways to get oil cheaply in the future - the electric grid can be powered by oil, just as it can be powered by coal, nuclear, geo-thermal, wind, solar, bacteria, wave technology and god knows what else.
Investing in electric grid powered transportation infrastructure opens you up to this free-market competition down the line. If coal proves to be the smart way forward, it works, if it's nuclear, still so, if oil is magically plentiful and cheap - again, nothing lost.
Add the fact that technologically it is pretty inefficient to produce the energy on board as is currently done with the internal combustion engine - especially when it is tied directly to the drive-train - using scale for the energy production in a power-plant is usually more efficient (and cleaner) - It is cheaper to buy goods created in bulk than to make all our own goods, the same will be true of energy where we will replace on board conversion (via the IC engine) with storage and use from a mass-production facility.
Bureaucrats have demonstrated over and over that they're really bad at picking winners and losers.
The beauty of using the electric grid as the transportation energy source is that they are picking winners and losers only in one specific area - distribution of the energy, and quite frankly, I think it is pretty clear that the electric grid is a more efficient way of distributing energy than the fleets of fuel tankers that supply the gas stations all around the country... - other than that - the way we create that electricity is open for the free market to optimize.
As for nuclear, "moving toward" is not the same as "beginning construction". There's so much useless regulation surrounding these plants, it's impossible to build them in this country.
You can not make loops with a Boeing 747, you do not run slaloms with an 18 wheeler. Your moves are deliberate and need to be started in advance. This is where we are with regard to nuclear energy in this country - but for the first time in 40 years, we are actually starting to make these moves. It's a start.
The truth is, we're awash in oil and more is being discovered every day. Oil is expensive because it's priced by a cartel. Break the cartel or avoid it altogether. Peak oil has been predicted time and time again, and always turns out to be false. Let energy costs rise or fall to their real levels and people will act accordingly. We have plenty of domestic sources of petroleum to satisfy our needs for decades, in which time we can develop technologies privately to replace them.
How are you going to break the oil-producing countries cartel? With war? Good luck with that...
BTW - the off-shore drilling/Alaska drilling is just as big a tanker to move as the nuclear one is in this country. But the reality is that by making the distribution a commodity via the electric grid - you do more to break the cartel's stronghold when you tell them - if you price us too high, we will use coal or nuclear or whatever else. Moving to the electric grid basically does some of what you want to do with regards to the oil cartels...
