If You Hated Gasoline at $4 a Gallon, Imagine It at $20: Books

As U.S. gasoline prices spurted last year to more than $4 a gallon, Americans shuddered.

Presidential candidates called for a gas-tax “holiday.” Sales of SUVs plunged. Commuters rediscovered trains, buses and bikes. Americans drove 100 billion fewer miles in the 12 months through October 2008 than they did a year before.

That was just a glimpse of things to come, says Christopher Steiner in “$20 Per Gallon,” a surprisingly upbeat look at how rising gasoline prices “will change our lives for the better.”
From the outset, Steiner dismisses the tiresome debate about whether oil production will really peak, plateau and decline. Even Boone Pickens, who made a fortune on oil and gas, says we must learn to live with peak oil.

With supplies of cheap, easy-to-extract oil dwindling and demand expected to rise in lockstep with the planet’s growing middle class, prices in the long haul can only go up, as economist Jeff Rubin argues in his book, “Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller.”

“$20 Per Gallon” takes peak oil as a given. “This book is the next step in the conversation,” Steiner says.

And a fun discussion it is, as the author lays out how everyday life might look as gasoline prices climb ever higher. In place of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, Steiner gives us Chapter $6 and Chapter $8, leading up by $2 increments to a $20 Epilogue. Gimmicks don’t usually appeal to me; this one works.

Bloomberg