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This sentence from the last page sums it up nicely:

Most pundits would say that Exxon is the larger company by far in every comparison that matters, particularly when you're thinking about who does or does not drive the American economy.

I would go a step further and say that fossil fuel extraction is the most important sector of the economy, at least from the perspective of what makes industrial civilization possible and allows human beings to number over 7 billion. After all, the last few centuries of technological progress and human biomass growth can largely be attributed to how we've creatively employed the vast armies of energy slaves liberated by the combustion of fossil fuels to do things like power generators, run combines and tractors, and make plastics and fertilizers. And human biomass proliferated in the 20th century largely due to our ability to convert stocks of low entropy stored solar energy into edible calories and fertilizers. The energy sector (which is dominated by fossil fuels) subsidizes other service and production sectors and makes our highly complex society possible (1).

So Apple or some bank may be largest or "most important" based on some metric employing fiat currency (that's being inflated away by the Federal Reserve) or the Wall Street casino's latest valuation based on pixie dust, but energy (or more precisely, exergy) is what really matters for civilization; everything else is just playing with your food.

(1) Joseph Tainter, "Complexity, Problem Solving, and Complex Societies."
http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/complex.htm

See also:

Ayres and Warr, "Accounting for Growth: The Role of Physical Work."
http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/economics/ayres_2005.pdf

why aren't we using it on all the coal we are exporting, considering oil is double the price point at which you say it becomes profitable?

Two reasons. One: High oil prices are actually a very new development, and may or may not be the new stable price point. Energy companies have been worried about the high oil prices crashing back down. Nobody wants to dump literally billions of dollars in an infrastructure development that is only profitable at $35 or above. Look at the price history over the last 20 years: http://www.oilcrash.com/images/simmons1/simmons1.gif. (Ignore the fearmongering site, it was the first hit I got on google for a 20 year price history of oil). You see why they're leery to hop into it. While Peak Oil may be popular on Slashdot, Energy Execs look at a price history like that and want to wait a while longer to see if the prices stabilize at their current high prices.

Two: The Oil Weapon. Their worst nightmare is dumping billions into coal liquefaction and then having oil prices unintentionally or intentionally fall below $35 and make them lose it all. Intentional manipulation and price dumping in this fashion (called the Oil Weapon) has been one of the major reasons why investors have been scared out of the market, and prices remain high. Eventually though, especially if Peak Oil is true, alternative oil sources will come online, and help drop oil prices.

Plus, what makes you think people aren't pushing for it? You have the senior senator in America heavily lobbying for FT coal conversion, as well as the governor of Montana. It takes a long time for huge shifts in energy infrastructure to take place. They were monkeying around in the Oil Sands of Alberta for years, and now Albertan oil sand production is the main reason the Loony is trading at par with the US Dollar. The senators arguing which voted against Byrd basically had by and large wrong data, which was kind of aggravating. Watching Feinstein say that FT was an unproven novel technology was just... yeah. You can call a 70 year old technology that ran two countries entirely by itself a lot of things, but unproven is not one of them.

Back to the issue of greenhouse gasses, let's be honest -- we have a built infrastructure of billions of dollars of cars out there. Americans will not give up their cars, they'll very rarely carpool or bike to work, and they won't switch to electric or hydrogen cars unless a gun is put to their heads. Hybrids caught on because they use the existing infrastructure. It's possible to build effectively zero emission vehicle cars, but you're looking at a 20 or 30 year process until all cars are zero emission. It's not something you can wave your hand and solve overnight. Emissions from power plants are a lot more controllable. Build a new coal plant or build a nuclear plant? That's something the government can actually make happen. Coal and nuclear have roughly the same cost per kilowatt, but zero emission coal plants have double or treble the cost, and retrofitting plants is not a cheap endeavor either. If we switch to nuclear power, we take advantage of the only cheap clean power source besides Hydro, and the environmental movement is largely and ironically blocking new dam construction. Wind and solar are somewhere between 2x and 6x the cost per kilowatt of nuclear, and are usually not actually zero emission, as they usually have coal power plant backstops that come online when its not windy or sunny. Plus, if we turn off our coal power plants, it will cause coal prices to come down, which will further drop gas prices.

Iceland plans to become the first oil-free country by 2050.

Best of luck to them: lots of people out there are saying that we're going to reach peak oil (the point at which supply of oil can no longer meet demand) much sooner - in which case, Iceland and, well, every other country won't have any choice but to be almost entirely oil free by 2050.

If only every country was at least this forward thinking and we didn't all take energy for granted.

Here's a few references: 1 2 3 4 5 or just Google for peak oil.

I'll no doubt get modded down to a (-1, Flamebait) for daring to suggest that the future may not be as rosy as we all wish, but have the relevant people taken peak oil into consideration when making such plans? It just seems a little ill thought out to be building new roads on such a scale if they aren't going to be of much use in another 15-20 years time.

See 1 2 3 4 5 or just Google for peak oil.

According to the article scramjet-powered missiles and aircraft could be in mass production as early as 2010.

That's great! Pity we'll probably be running out of oil to power these things by then.

China's economy is growing exponentially at a rate of about 7% a year - That's a doubling time of about ten years.

It's now estimated that China will require about 80% of the world's oil exports by 2015 if this trend is continued.

And it can only get worse as these finite reserves of oil are consumed. What is the end game we are heading towards? Surely it is nuclear war or nuclear terrorism. We cannot tolerate where this is heading, yet we seem to ignore the clear signposts.

This is why I said a rise in the price of oil is a good thing.