Book Review: The brighter side of expensive oil

Review of: $20 Per Gallon: How the inevitable rise in the price of gasoline will change our lives for the better by Christopher Steiner

During the boom years, there was a spate of books warning that we were all doomed. One of the most popular spine-chillers was the threat of peak oil: the prospect that the world’s oil production is about to go into irreversible decline, bringing about the downfall of civilisation as we know it.

At their most apocalyptic, the underlying message of these books was, in the words of The Simpsons newscaster Kent Brockman: “It’s time for our viewers to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside.”
Christopher Steiner’s $20 Per Gallon, as its cheery subtitle suggests, is very different. It is the latest, and the best, example of a new type of book that seeks to put a feel-good spin on the imminent exhaustion of one of our most vital natural resources.

Hot on the heels of Jeff Rubin’s Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, which also examined the prospect of peak oil without panic or despair, Steiner focuses on the brighter side of a world in which a shortage of supply has sent petrol prices soaring.

He builds on Rubin’s argument, and quotes him a couple of times, but accentuates the positive even more, and deepens the analysis into a more granular level of detail, coming up with a wealth of intriguing observations and ideas.

As with many books of this type, $20 Per Gallon is too long and runs out of fuel itself in the later chapters. Energy efficiency is at work in the writing, which ekes as much mileage as possible out of some of its ideas.

Mr Steiner could also be faulted for overdoing the optimism, particularly in the light of the experience of the past year.

It is true that in the long run economic development in China, India and elsewhere will drive up the price of oil, but if the price rises too high, then the world economy will go into recession, oil demand will drop and the price will fall again.

Last year proved that the US economy cannot live with $4 petrol; coping happily with $20 still looks a long way off.

Financial Times