I don't think I'm very happy about that vision, but I suspect it is on the money.
The best solution would be to stop using oil as an energy source now with any purpose except to get us over the hump. We don't even yet know how to get over the hump, realistically. The options are solar, wind, and gravity and all of those options require so much energy that we could exhaust remaining supplies making them productive enough to satisfy us all. It will take a lot of solar panels to cover the sahara, connect it to the grid, etc.
In the meantime, we're powering inefficient combustion engines and growing corn to, you guessed it... power inefficient combustion engines...
Not to mention the fact that the ethanol itself has a lower energy density than gasoline, so mixing it in with gas is simply diluting the energy of the gas.