It isn't leadership that is lacking, in this post-Bush era, it's the ability to coalesce around a plan of HOW to go about it. That shouldn't be dismissed as mere fractiousness.
The HOW has consequences that can determine the very fabric of our society. Who will be the winners and losers, who will pay for the cost, and who will reap the beneifts are all vital questions that have to be considered seriously and in depth.

Failure to do so in the Industrial age, and more recently, when globalization took hold, has had enormous consequences, some of them devastating to large swaths of the population. Then there comes the backlash.

We could determine the HOW by presidential decree. In a democracy, it's more difficult. While frustrating, ,the advantage is that we do have this window of opportunity to conconsider consequences as well as alternative approaches.

. The reason that the Manhattan Project was different is that it had only one goal and everything was focused on it. Also, much of the science was already know and the project was engineering to develop the components. A better equivalent would be a Manhatten Project for hydrogen fule cells.

In the current atmosphere, the energy manhattan project would be a pork laden program with multiple goals and would probably fail.