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Umm, no. there are 100's of years of fossil fuels. see:Coal.

[citation needed] But that's ok I will provide them.

First, I dare you to design coal-powered cars and airplanes.

Second, yet another person who doesn't know how to divide. According to the US government, there are about 2.75 x 10^11 short tons of coal in the US. That 275 billion tons may seem like a lot. Now consider that the US currently is consuming (again according to the US government) over a billion tons a year. That means that at current levels of production, there are under 275 years worth of coal left. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it?

Now consider that US coal production is not fixed but is growing every year - and will grow even faster when oil starts getting seriously expensive because it's running out, and you have far less than 275 years remaining. In fact you may not even have 100 years remaining. Especially when you also consider your population is doubling every 50 years or so. Who cares, in 100 years we will all be dead right? Yeah, but when it's gone, it's gone forever.

We have 250 years at current rates, including about 50% of our electric generation.
        http://www.clean-energy.us/facts/coal.htm [clean-energy.us]

Emphasis mine.

That's your mistake, and the mistake of many politicians when planning for the future.

Nobody seems to have paid any attention in their maths classes.

Our rate of consumption of practically everything has been increasing exponentially for centuries now. A large part of that is increased population, but increased per-capita usage also contributes. Think about what will happen when everyone in China will want a car!

"Current rates of consumption" doesn't even account for linear growth, let alone exponential.

You'll find that we have less than 50 years of oil left, and when it runs out, we'll likely switch to coal for whatever we used to use oil for. That will increase coal usage massively, on top of the background increase in usage.

Read about the Energy policy of China: "China currently generates around two thirds of its electricity from coal-fired power stations.[15] It is progressing with the construction of 562 new coal-fired plants over the next few years.[21] In June 2007, it was reported that an average of two new plants were being opened every week."

You might assume that "domestic coal usage will remain unchanged", but coal is a global commodity. If the price is driven up by the demand anywhere, it will be traded to maximize profits. Australia, where I live, is building multi-billion dollar docks to increase the amount of coal that can be exported to China. We export $22B AUD/year of coal now, and their demand just keeps going up.

For the love of god, educate yourself (and your representatives) about the implications of exponential growth. There's a great series of videos on Youtube which you must watch, because "at current rates of consumption" is basically deluded. You may as well believe in Santa Claus.

The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See (part 1 of 8)

Actually, we may, even using it as primary transportation fuel.

We have 250 years at current rates, including about 50% of our electric generation.
    http://www.clean-energy.us/facts/coal.htm

Our coal usage for electric is almost exactly that of our transportation needs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USEnFlow02-quads.gif

So we could switch to nuclear for electric, some plug-in hybrids, coal for liquid fuels and be good to go for hundreds of years. Not even counting our Natural gas reserves.

How? Most of the electricity in this country comes from coal.

I think you answered your own question without even getting into specifics. Let's assume coal burning power plants and gas using cars have the same environmental footprint. 52% of electricity generated in the US is from coal. Just by switching to all electric cars cuts environmental impact by 50%.

That doesn't even take into account how much easier it is to clean coal emissions from a hundreds of immobile sources vs cleaning ICE emissions from hundreds of millions of moving sources. It also doesn't take into account how easy it would be to switch the power source. The numbers I've seen are about 600 coal plants and about 204 million cars in the US. Making a cleaner coal plant would require doing the same to 340,000 cars. But if we had all electric cars, then replacing one coal plant, or even just making one coal plant cleaner, means you've already made that many cars or more that much cleaner.

According to this site, estimated world demand was 13.9 trillion kilowatt-hours in 2001.

13.9 trillion kW/h / 8776 (hours/year) = 1.58TW

This figure is comparable to the statement in the wikipedia that 2001 average world consumption was 1.7TW in 2001. So our sources agree within a reasonable margin.

According to the wikipedia, the energy density from solar energy reaching the surface as a global average is 170 W/m2. At 40.7% efficient, that's 69.2W/m2.

Using the lower figure of 1.58TW calculated above, you'd need 22.8 x 10^9 square meters, or approximately 8800 square miles of solar cells to meet 2001 world demand. (Or "just" 1900 square miles to meet the peak US demand of ~3 trillion kWh in the late 90s). Of course, these areas halve if sited in an area of the US where the solar energy density is 375 W/m2 (4000 square miles for world demand, 860 square miles for US demand).

Neither correspond to the whopping (265x265) 70000 square miles the article summary claims. Sorry kdawson, looks like you're a magnitude out!

Whats killing people today is not nuclear power. Its not using nuclear power thats killing people. Consider that a 2.7 mpg increase in the fuel efficiency of automobiles would eliminate the need for foreign oil. Considering that the average car has a fuel efficiency of about 22 mpg, and that oil accounts for about 7% of US energy production, if all the oil that was being used for electricity was nuclear instead, we would be independent of foreign oil. If that were the case, our interest in the Middle East would decline. Events like the first and second Iraqi war would not have occured. Instead, rabid environmentalists are causing people to be indirectly killed because of their failure to understand science and irrational fear of technologies that they don't control.

The importance of energy independence to national security cannot be underestimated.