they say that there is enough energy in 1 liter of seawater to power a big city for one year, only we can't extract that energy yet.
Well, all matter is energy in a different form, according to Einstien's special relativity, so technically there is a massive amount of energy in *everything*. That being said, it would take much more power to actually extract said energy that you would get out of the water.
and honestly, people who invent new free energy sources have a strange tendancy to disappear or get visits from guys in black suits. like the inventor of the joe cell, who can make cars run on tapwater.
There is no such thing as "free energy". That violates the laws of physics. All of these "amazing car runs on water" stories always turn out to be internet rumors or hoaxes. Any minor reading about the joe cell you mentioned will quickly show that is is just like all the other internet hoaxes like perpetual motion machines, etc.
as long as the world is run by money we will only see fake sollutions like hybrid cars or hydrogen fuel cells. all these "sollutions" are provided by the same companies who earn money out of oil and want to keep us strangled in their grip by offering us complicated and expensive technologies.
All the alternatives to gasoline will be complicated and expensive now. Every new technology starts out being expensive. Replacing gasoline will be immensely hard, simply because when they early innovators in internal combustion engines settled on a fuel to use, they made a very good choice. Gasoline is easy to refine, easy store and transport, and has a very high energy density. From an energy standpoint, it is almost the ideal fuel for a vehicle like a car. Since they are in early stages of development, all the other technologies still need to catch up to gasoline in terms of cost and ease of production.
while there are thousands of easy and clean ways to produce energy, like the sun, wind, seawaves, methanisation, wood, thermal energy, water barrages. sure these sources are not sufficient, but if all the money that we spend on making biofuels would instead had been spent to improve the thermal isolations of houses and make them more energy efficient, then we would have saved out more fossile fuel, then what we would have produced in biofuels with that money...
Billions of dollars are already being spent on sources such as solar, wind, tidal power, and biomass methane production. They all have their own associated problems, however. Wind power for example, is erratic, and therefore can only be used to fill in gaps in power production, rather than being used to supply base power.
but again, global warming and clean energy has already become a multybillion dollar industry on wich many many people are earning indecent amounts of money, so don't hope for them to solve that problem, as their wealth directly depends on the size of the global warming problem.
I'll agree with you that the E85 ethanol plan is stupid, but that is the government's fault rather than industry's. Businesses are will always be out to make a profit when they can. They have seen that oil-based power will eventually no longer be a feasible power source and they are investing money researching alternatives. That's why we have many companies producing alternative-energy cars, such as the hybrids, electrics, air powered cars, and all the other ideas.