driftless's Full Review: Christopher Steiner - $20 Per Gallon: How the Inev...
Predicting the future is hard. Even over the short term. Weather forecasters, stock pickers and palm readers keep their jobs mainly due to their clients' generosity and ignorance. In $20 Per Gallon, journalist Christopher Steiner takes a bold shot at predicting how the greatest economic upheaval in the history of the human race will play out. With each chapter he outlines how each up tick in the price of gasoline will transform society in myriad and far reaching ways, starting with a $4 prologue, progressing upward by $2 increments, and ending with a $20 grand finale.
With impressively unbridled optimism, the author argues that the gradual increase in gas prices over the next decade will change our lives for the better. From the death of the SUV and the jet airplane to the ascent of the electric car and the railway, he outlines society's transformation in a clear, concise and entertaining style. He also spends several chapters explaining how rising gas prices will affect every other aspect of our lives, from where we live, to what we eat and how we organize our cities. Somehow, he never fails to find the silver lining in these changes, almost convincing this reader that the human race can somehow survive this rude transformation unscathed.
Mr. Steiner's training as both an engineer and journalist is well displayed with understandable explanations of numerous complicated technological and economic topics. He impressed me by arranging a vast amount of information, details and trivia into a coherent and entertaining whole and he never hesitates to make very specific predictions about incredibly complicated processes. He has an enthusiasm for nuclear energy that made me a bit uncomfortable, but I bought his argument that nuclear energy will eventually become an economic necessity once gas prices double or triple from their current levels. Throughout the book he interviews some of the individuals who are on the forefront of the transformation to an oil free world, providing me some reassurance that there are some truly talented people who might really make this work.
The only problem I had with this eye-opening and thoroughly compelling, well-researched, 200 page book is his unrelenting optimism. I kept getting the feeling that Steiner must really be a Vulcan. He presents a formidable economic, social or technical problem resulting from climbing gas prices and then describes a completely logical and rational response to said problem. I kept saying to him, "You do realize you're talking about human beings, don't you?" I find it hard to believe that as the noose tightens and as $10 gas becomes $12 gas that religious fanaticism or political shenanigans won't utterly trump all logic and rationality, especially when you toss in profound climate change and a global water shortage. As I understand history, the human race has never responded to anything with even a tenth as much reasonableness as Steiner requires for his predictions to come to pass. Unfortunately, the youthful idealist that was planning to fly to work on a solar powered jet pack when I grew up was a bit too pessimistic to buy Steiner's argument. Despite this rather large problem I found the book completely entertaining from beginning to end, reading it more as a fascinating work of near-future, reality-based science fiction. I'm sure that Arthur C. Clarke would have liked it too.
Though he never actually comes out and says it, Steiner really is using the "heroin" model to explain the Age of the Hydrocarbon. All of the negative consequences of our addiction are becoming rather obvious and our inability to actually get off the stuff has been clear since the 1970s. We rationalize, postpone, scheme and deny, but the inevitability of oil's increasing scarcity is the reality we will have to face eventually. $20 Per Gallon serves as an introduction to the drug rehab clinic that we'll all be checking into sooner or later. Probably sooner. In the end, I have to agree with the author that if we do somehow find a logical way through this mess, the oil-free world will be a better place for everyone.
In this timely expose, Forbes writer Steiner examines how the rising cost of gasoline is already changing our social and cultural existence, and that ...More at Buy.com
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