Just finished $20 Per Gallon by Christopher Steiner. This is a book that I wish were a bit more popular; though it may have missed the mark into the American consciousness since the price of gasoline since dipped again between it’s construction and its release.
Steiner is not the best writer out there; yet I can certainly relate to his approach and appreciate his perspective. He’s an engineer, and he’s fascinated with what good will come of the world once we start to drip away our American addiction to oil. $20 Per Gallon is set into chapters with sequential consequences from increments of the price of gasoline: $4 introduction, followed by a $6 chapter, etc.
Obviously, then, the book is largely speculation. We don’t have a world where gas costs $20 a gallon in America, and so it’s a silly attempt to figure out what exactly is going to happen at that point in time. If you’re looking for hard data or absolute proof, then these pages may not satisfy you; but I’d then argue that the same goal was silly at the start. With that said, Steiner has thought out a whole lot of consequences stemming from massive increases in the cost of fuel: food production, transportation, globalization, and a variety of other topics are dissected and plotted out in the eventual patterns which we most likely will see.
What I like most about the book is the amount of positivity that the author sees for our future. It is rather easy to see doom in the face of increased consumer cost of just about anything; though in terms of energy, the base component of how we live our lives, a higher ticket price does not mean we will waste away.
On the contrary, Steiner argues largely that we will adapt quite well, and that we will just have to structure ourselves differently than we have in the past forty or fifty years. Cheap oil has allowed us to be lazy; it’s allowed our food to go to shit; it’s tied us inescapably to cars, in countless numbers, and it’s also allowed us to move our economy away from the borders of the country, taking away our jobs and investments in the same movement.
It may help that I see certain parts of science-fiction in this book. A big part of what moves us forward as a society is some kind of conflation of what is now fiction and what can be reality in our future. Steiner seems to understand this, and my only hope is that there are enough people out there who see such signs as opportunities rather than omens of doom.