Not oil, that's for sure. Right now, most electricity comes from gas and coal, nuclear and hydro. Oil makes up less than %1 of electricity generation. Even on a coal grid, there are less CO2 emissions from electric cars than gas cars. By the time all cars are electric, all electricity will come from solar and wind and hydro.

You don't need to excite the general public. You need to excite some weirdo genius cult leader who realizes that his Utopian vision just isn't going to happen on Earth. Then space will happen.

Not to mention the more direct studies in which various distant objects were observed to detect occlusion events. Not enough events were detected to account for the idea of dark matter being composed of Brown Dwarfs and other small "normal" objects.

FAILURE. Ground solar power represents 175,000 terrawatts. 10 billion Americans is 100 terrawatts. That means that if you used less than %0.1 of the total area of the Earth, you could power one of the largest future resource consumption scenarios imagined. Guess where most of those solar arrays are going to be? You guessed it, on the 3.9% of Earth covered by American suburbs.

Conservation, and the illusion of limited energy, distracts us from the real solutions, and impedes renewable energy construction.

The problem with this idea is that public transit consumes a lot more energy than people assume. For example, the cleanest electric light rail in the united states consumes approximately 3 times as much energy per passenger mile as driving a Tesla Roadster electric car. The best transit rail system I have reviewed is in Japan, where the system uses approximately as much energy as the average electric car would. High speed intercity trains can consume much less than cars but they are a drop in the bucket for overall consumption. Buses also use a lot of fuel, the average Bus gets around 36 MPG per person. The average car gets 23 MPG (and rising) but contains 1.54 people, so it gets around the same MPG as well. Here is a link to my source (further links in article).

Several important points about this technology.

1. It is just a battery. Many people read about hydrogen and snicker "EROI EROI it's just a battery not a source of energy it's worthless Nah Nah." But that isn't true. We need a battery system, and hydrogen and aluminum have a lot more energy density than most other batteries. There is no theoretical reason why making hydrogen or aluminum with electricity should be less efficient than charging and discharging batteries. There are practical reasons.

2. It is true that aluminum production uses huge amounts of electricity per volume/mass of aluminum. That is actually a good thing. Aluminum production is around 70% efficient (there is huge market pressure for improvement). It is mostly smelted using hydroelectric power. The insane energy consumption is good because aluminum has 2x the energy content by volume as gasoline.

3. This system is very inefficient, because the reaction of aluminum with water wastes energy as heat. This is because there is a lot more energy in oxidizing one Al atom than in one H2 molecule. This aluminum+water process comes up a lot, and while I agree that it is a nice process, it really does not have a niche it can fill. Only 50% of energy of the Al ends up in the H2. Then, only 40% of the energy of the hydrogen ends up being converted to electricity in the hydrogen fuel cell, so the net aluminum->electricity efficiency is only 20%. It gets worse, because hydrogen fuel cells are too expensive for cars. As a result, we have to use a combustion engine, and end up with only 10% aluminum->motion efficiency. A better way to do this is with a straight aluminum fuel cell. Aluminum fuel cells (which consume metallic aluminum without producing hydrogen) are about 40% efficient. They are also cheaper than hydrogen fuel cells.

4. Schemes like this may not seem like batteries, but they are. Infact, all such electricity->something->electricity schemes are batteries, and may be compared directly on efficiency, energy density and cost per unit energy. Here is rough comparison of efficiencies. For cars, you need to have an efficiency of above 25% to be as green as gasoline cars on average grids, and you need to have an efficiency of above 50% to be as green as gasoline cars on a coal grid.
Electricity->aluminum->hydrogen->engine = 10%
Electricity->aluminum->hydrogen->fuel cell = 20%
Electricity->hydrogen (compressed)->fuel cell = 25%
Electricity->aluminum->electricity = 28%
Electricity->Zinc->electricity = 50%
NiCad/NiMh/Lead Acid = 70%
Li-ion = 90%

You can get something better: neato. It uses LIDAR.

If you have solar panels capture the energy, they simply suck the energy up, store it, and when it returns as heat in the friction of the objects it moves, the lights it powers, etc. Without the solar panels, the light would just be heat. So it is free.

Which university?

The main issue with public transportation energy efficiency is occupancy. Trains and buses in a "walk-on" schedule are not guaranteed to be fully occupied. Airlines and highspeed rail operators manage demand so that trains and planes are often up to 70% occupied. However, walk-on buses and trains often have under 20% occupancy. What this means is that cars do a lot better except in rare, properly-managed, high-density scenarios. Here in the USA, outside of a few urban areas, such San Francisco and New York, there simply are not the densities needed for successful public transport operation. In these cases, the automobile (and motorcycle) are actually more efficient because of occupancy.

Case in point. A 55 passenger advanced hybrid passenger bus gets 5.5 MPG city. With all seats full, it gets 300 pMPG, which is really good. But, this almost never happens. Why? Because the average number of people on a bus in the USA is 9 (UK is 10). What that means is that the bus gets 55 MPG. A Prius with one driver gets 50 MPG, which is similar. A Prius with 5 people packed in gets 250 pMPG, similar to the bus (I'm sure the Prius would do better if it was a diesel hybrid).

In a suburb, or in a rural area (like most of the US!), most of the trains would be empty. Rail also has very high costs (much higher than building a road and running the cars) associated with it if it cannot be fully utilized. Should people live in suburbs in rural areas or should they give them up and live in a city because of transportation efficiency? That's a different question. What we do know is that cars are the best way to deal with suburbs and rural areas, and buses are a necessity for those who cannot afford to own cars or cannot drive cars because of disability. In the future, if robotic cars become a reality, we can have robo-taxis instead of buses for the disabled.

Actually, the train is already maxed out in efficiency. People don't understand how efficient electric vehicles are. Well designed ones, such as that Japanese train and Tesla Roadster are 90% efficient or more. There's not much room for improvement in either case. Many people are building their homemade electric cars on A/C induction motors which are used for industrial equipment and trains - one electric motor that powers on axle of a train can easily power a car. It might actually be more efficient (but not by much) because oversized motors are used at lower current, which reduces cooling and gives the car more HP, which is always good.

This really demonstrates the fact that switching to alternative energy sources (switching from gasoline to electric) can have better effects than conserving energy by switching from one mode of transit to another.

BTW, in the USA, there is an average 1.54 passengers per car, so to make it fair to the car, the car uses 100-170 watt-hours/passenger-mile.

Yeah. I was trying to type 250 watt*hours/mile, not 25. Ironically, 25 is right for a moped. Leaf has a 24 kWh battery pack and goes 100 miles/charge, so I think were in the ballpark.

Aluminium also contains 2x as much energy as gasoline by volume.

That number, posted above, is inflated. It is really 25 watt*hours/mile.

That figure is inflated by a factor of 5 - it's really 16 kWh/100 km or $1.6/km. In the USA, needs to tax gas at $0.60 a gallon to pay for roads (it currently taxes it at $0.40~ish).