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Well, there are three primary reasons.

1. Corporate interest - there is no underestimating the power of the oil, gas and business as usual car companies. In the 1960's or so , alot of the executives we now have in office were students and saw the radicalization of both sides of the political spectrum, the conformists largely became interested in business and preservation of the system, the non-conformists have had disproportionately less influential and thus business reflected politics in a way and became far more conservative than their predecessors in the first 60 or so years of the 20th century.

This has had a very profound result as conformists generally do not innovate. So as they increase in power they became comfortable being complacent doing "what they've always done" - because it IS what THEY have always done but it is not what WAS always done.

2. In the 1970's after the first oil price shocks many industries moved away from oil, the automotive industry put various efficiencies - weight savings and fuel injection are the two big differences, however once this new crop of conservative business leaders got into charge, very little to no real innovation has occurred in the US.

Japan and Germany's reaction to the 1970's shocks was much more dramatic, Japan within 3 years stabilized it's use of oil at 1973 values and radically increased it's use of other fuel sources - mostly gas and nuclear. Furthermore most all other western nations (except the US) embarked on aggressive nuclear development programs, such that France, Japan and Germany are primarily lit by nuclear rather than coal or oil. Here again, conservatism and legitimately the 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters caused a near moratorium on further nuclear development.

Most dramatically however, was the approach from a society perspective regarding the automobile, Europe has gas-taxes which are something approaching 2 times the raw cost of the fuel. Americans universally pay some small fraction of the production cost as a tax, but Europeans and Japanese routinely pay 200-300% above cost for gasoline. This disadvantages gasoline and has helped for Europe and most dramatically Germany and Japan to reorder their societies around more centralized / less sub-urban living, mass-transit and high efficiency vehicles.

As a result of 20+ years of US complacency & conservatism in the board-room, we are nearly 15-20 years behind in many important technological areas, particularly energy production and energy utilization.

3. Largely speaking, while much of industry which USES energy has become or is becoming efficient by necessity, the oil-gas and transportation sectors conservatism extends into both the courtroom/classroom and the civic square, it would be tragic in and of itself it such complacency was limited internally to the transportation and energy sectors, but largely speaking, it's translated into political muscle, (is why both the Vice President and the President, are conservative and oil-guys).

So while there is much political talk about "hydrogen" (a technological looser for automobiles at least), or "ethanol" (another net looser on both environmental and food production grounds), this is so much puppetry to distract Americans from the real national danger that we are currently exposed to and to be able to say they are "doing" something.

The real "behind the scenes" action is frankly fairly depressing, the President was only to happy to announce a "clean coal initiative" in 2005, only to cancel all future research for the program this year.

Similarly, the US has been withdrawn from the ITER international fusion ignition program, similarly many other alternative energy development programs have been axed or are of little potential threat to the oil/gas folks, so are defunded due to "budget cuts" or something which sounds responsible, and will remain so for the remainder of this president's term.

In the immediate (next 50 years) we need to refocus our automotive industry primarily on ultra-high efficiency engines and technologies which will enable the average consumer car to achieve around 300-400MPG, this would do much to safeguard the US love of the automobile.

Longer term, we need to invest in geologically based oil replacement technologies (most likely microbe/algae generated) - to an extent, since there is a "non-negotiable" amount of oil which we will need for agriculture / fertilizers and for production of other petrochemicals.

Longer term I avoid the pessimism of Howard Kunstler's "Long Emergency", which is not to say that I think his dark vision is impossible, I just think we are more adaptive than Mr. K gives people credit for.

I suspect that two known and very reliable energy sources will come into play over time.

1. Geothermal energy production is very likely to become hugely widespread, and in 100 years or so I suspect that Exxon - if it exists at all , will be largely a geothermal and hydrocarbon energy production company.

2. "Battery" efficiency, we will see - over the next 10-20 years innovations in the laboratory which are already researched, come to market which promise to extend battery life by 200-300 percent if not more, turning batteries into something more like power-cells.

In the larger national interest, energy independence also allows us to actually free up many other resources, such as those available in the military for more productive use, AND allows us to exersize a foreign policy abroad which is both less militaristic and much more consistent with our historical national values.