There is so much misinformation here I don't know where to start.
You could start by comparing the amount of resources wasted and pollution caused and trouble taken to find, acquire, fight over, and build equipment to get oil, transport it, go to war for it, destroy lives for it, and then trash the planet by both spills and use of it.
Secondly, power plants CAN be made cleaner and more efficient...harvesting oil and burning it cannot....particularly in light of the facts that getting to it is getting much harder and more pristine areas of the planet are now going to trashed to harvest it.
Controlling pollution at the source..i.e. a power-plant...can be far more regulated, controlled, and improved...burning of oil by millions of cars that run in all sorts of operating conditions from well maintained to extremely poorly maintained cannot.
I've not even touched on start-up emissions by millions of vehicles every single day all over the world...many times a day, the mismanagement of used oils and fluids, the dumping of oils and fluids and containers that hold them, etc etc etc.
Funny you mention all those poisonous materials for fabrication of semi conductors and such...yet the materials used for drilling, clean-up like Corexit and other wonderfully ocean compatible substances to disperse the toxic sludge dumped and leaked everywhere doesn't seem to phase anyone.
Not mention, the whole loads of highly toxic sludge running off daily in massive tail ponds so large you can see from space by the fiasco we know as the Canadian Tar Sands joke. For every barrel of bitumen mined from the oilsands, 1.5 barrels of toxic tailings waste is produced...now that's definitely more efficient than transmission lines.
Also, here's a review of what's in those tail ponds:
Tailings contaminants include naphthenic acids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, phenolic compounds, ammonia, mercury and other trace metals.
The liquid found in oilsands tailings ponds is acutely toxic to aquatic organisms and mammals. Naphthenic acids are considered to be one of the most significant environmental contaminants resulting from the development of the oilsands the effects of which are still largely unknown.
The National Pollutant Release Inventory publicly reports the amount of toxic materials disposed in tailings ponds each year. While more than 75 toxic are tracked, some specific aggregate amounts for 2010 include:
Arsenic: 300,905 kg
Benzene: 178,200 kg
Lead: 756,793 kg
Mercury: 824 kg
Toluene: 1,169,000 kg
Sum of all PAH compounds: 341,997 kg
Power plants also have the potential of becoming cleaner and we can ultimately have a choice of energy source to power the vehicles....with IC cars you do not...the whole carbon neutral thing is baloney.
You seem to think progress doesn't happen in alternative energy industries yet it does in oil and gas.
So let's put things into a little perspective before criticizing them.
