Energy, fossil fuels and carbon footprint

As oil prices skyrocketed, many people and companies are reconsidering their fuel usage, and adjusting behaviour. Still, we clearly have much oil, coal and natural gas, to be extracted at current prices. Besides that, we still got atom. And I'm sure that market forces are enough to force people to save energy. The only thing that government needs to do is to change some of existing taxes to pollution taxes - but real pollution, not harmless CO2. After all, before we burnt all this fuel, couple of dozen millions years ago, it was in the air, in threes, and so on, wasn't it?

I have read also quite a bit about electric cars recently. They seem pretty cheap to use right now, as cost of 1km is $0.01-$0.03 (off-peak fare) comparing to $0.1+ when using gas.
But there's a catch - replacement of batteries (after 50-100k km) costs roughly $25k. This adds up to a lot more than gas price (even at current oil prices), rendering it not yet reasonable.

Therefore the way to go for now seems to be Toyota Prius. But I don't mean going hybrid. This is still not feasible IMHO. The reason why Prius is efficient is drawn mainly from its low weight, not from regenerative breaking. But all these experiments such as EV1, Prius or Tesla Roadster are great because they are improving all the pieces we need to be more effective. And it's better Priuses than Hammers are fashionable...