Why isn america taking agressive steps to seize a replacment technology for powering motorized vehicles?
I have to suspect that private industry will only put research into technology that has a profit stream. Their interest is in the survival of their company and profitability to their stockholders, and not to providing cheap energy to America. In this light, the best organization to move aggressively toward developing replacement energy technology would be the US government. As long as corporate dollars fund the political parties and their campaigns, I see no chance of that happening.