Well now, protesting is more fun than actually taking action yourself :P
Absolutely, write your representatives at the local, state, and national levels, but don't forget to do what you can.
Let's see. Buy local organic produce. Petroleum is used extensively for chemical fertilizer production. Try to eat just one more vegan/vegetarian meal a week. Eggs and cheese are awesome and cheep. Meat takes a lot of resources.
Move closer to where you eat/shop/play. We love being in walking distance of our grocery store. Carpool or use mass transit once in awhile (remember flying is mass transit!)
Encourage landfill recovery to produce biofuels and methane for fuel. Encourage biofuel development from waste products instead of food, for example, agricultural leftovers like corn stalks or cotton plants or industrial food producion like food scraps instead of the corn or soybeans or sugar beets.
Stop paying farmers to not grow things!
and lastly, if you can't walk somewhere, and can't carpool, then look at an electric motorbike or a motorcycle if you're in an area with mostly good weather and safe areas to ride, or get a bicycle.
Unplug your appliances when you aren't using them, plug them into power strips to make it easy. Microwaves, TVs, DVDs, and computers all use tremendous amounts of energy when they're just sitting there turned on.
Eventually all these little actions can lead to big progress.
I'm curious about all my negative votes...too hard to take any personal responsibility for energy use, too hard to shop your local farmers market, hate your coworkers/family/school mates to carpool once in awhile? Flipping the off switch before bed time too tough? Too busy blaming the politicians to take action? If you want to blame the oil companies and Congress, your only options are to a)lobby and b)make a personal change to use less of their product, but seriously, making changes in your habits and your friend's energy habits will have a faster impact than higher mpg requirements that won't take full effect for a decade
Heck, the UK signed the Kyoto treaty and their energy use and carbon emissions are no where near meeting Kyoto goals AND their carbon emissions are actually HIGHER than when they started, they've achieved NO reduction in carbon emissions, so stop kidding yourselves that government is going to be the main solution to environmental problems.
Educating the public, demanding more energy efficient products from businesses, and making personal changes to our way of living will pay results years before the gubmint gets their roundtoit on environmental policy. If we don't walk the walk, why would Congress ever pay attention to us?