Christopher Steiner

$20 Per Gallon by Christopher Steiner looks at what the rising price of oil will do the average American lifestyle. The chapters are divided up by price ranges, starting with relatively small price increases and then much larger ones.

The idea of the book is to show just how dependent the modern American lifestyle is on petroleum, from transportation, to plastics, to lighting and heating, and so forth.

Transportation will need to be reinvented, or retooled. Air travel will be de-emphasized for show more other forms: like trains and perhaps ships. Of course the American rail system both long distance and intercity was largely gutted starting the 1940s and ending in the 1970s with the creation of Amtrak. Much of this change was forced by the automobile industry, pushing busses and personal automobiles.

But the book assumes a very homogenous American lifestyle. Gasoline even at its cheapest in the 1990s was never as slow in California as it was the midwest. Yes, there were still a bunch of SUVs (parents, duped into believing they needed them to safely cart their kids around.

Looking locally, since gasoline prices have wobbled between $3 and $5.50 a gallon for about the last ten years, there have been a number of changes. Plastic consumption is down where I live (though mostly to avoid litter, rather than to save on petrol). Cars have gotten smaller and hatchbacks are in vogue again (having last been popular in the early 1990s). Parking lots are starting to install solar panels on their roof tops. The local gas and electric utility offers us online monitoring of our usage and incentives to conserve. BART is getting extensions to its service (though still not anywhere close to it was original envisioned in the 1970s) and there's a bullet train in the works.

But my experience in the Bay Area is no more representative to the entire country than the author's is. The energy problem is huge and diverse. show less

Christopher Steiner, civil engineer and journalist, has written a thought provoking book about the end of the gasoline age and how it will change society, transportation and the economy. The chapter titles (e.g. Chapter $6, Society Change and the Dead SUV) representing levels at which various things become uneconomical or economical. As the price of gas goes up, air travel will become rare and expensive, WalMart will die, the off-shoring trend will reverse, food production will go back to show more being more local, etc. He discusses various other forms of energy production. There is a bibliography at the end and an index which could have used a bit more proof reading. I didn't check the whole index but it references a Volkswagen "Ketta" which is really a Jetta on the target page and there was at least one reference that was a page off. I realize this book is aimed at an American audience, but it would have been nice to have some reference to the metric system for the rest of us. For the record, $20 per gallon is $5.67 Canadian per litre.

Steiner's journalism background shows in his ability to write an accessible, clear and organized book, which was a pleasure to read. He highlights the opportunities that the end of affordable gasoline offers and the reader is left with a picture of a pretty attractive future - less pollution, people living closer together in more ecologically sustainable communities supported by local food production, the renaissance of small town centres (as long as the small towns in question are on rail lines and/or rivers). As the subtitle indicates, he's focusing on how the rise of gasoline will change our lives for the better.

As a place to start discussion, this book is great, but I finished it with many questions and a fear that the real future will be somewhat less rosy. What happens if (as seems to be the case where I live) governments and big business continue to pretend that everything is fine and there's unlimited gas left and don't start the preparations now for the end of the fossil fuel era? What if they keep bailing out uneconomical petroleum-based industries instead of supporting innovation and development of new technologies? Rail may be more economical when the cost of gas is $18 a gallon but it's a lot cheaper to build the rail network NOW, and the rail companies and the government have spent years ripping up track and selling off the rights-of-way. Remote and northern communities will die along with energy/water hogs like Las Vegas because they can't produce enough local food to support themselves, the transportation networks don't exist to supply them economically and how many small town jobs will pay enough to keep people above the poverty line? It's a thorny issue in far northern communities today - it will only get worse. I hope this book will open a few eyes and spark a few innovators to start taking matters into their own hands, because I don't see the government doing anything. show less

Steiner's done a decent job on researching the future impacts of steadily growing petroleum prices on the lifestyles of people in the future. Well, almost decent, but yet, in most terms half-baked.
The book's tag should be more aptly be, "How the Rising Cost of Gasoline Will Radically Change American Lives", as the book covers nothing outside the boundaries of the USA; which is, for the majority of the population of the world, distantly inconsequential.
I would, as a citizen of a developing show more economy be more interested in a global perspective of the radical changes to the world - like the world economy, globalization, international politics and terrorism, predictions on emerging technologies and geographies, etc.
Not that I have anything against Americans, but this book was too narrowly focused for my taste, which does not include the inconveniences an American suburban family with 3-4 cars in their driveway would face.
I'd suggest reading something else more worthwhile your time. show less

This brisk read goes into a lot of detail on pioneer hacker Petterfy and how he innovated, at the oscilloscope and cut wire level, the "quants" role on Wall Street. This part of the book reminded me of the early computing age era whodunit The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage. Steiner follows the bouncing ball of algorithm-driven economic growth to the West Coast and Facebook, a fascinating account of what is being done to auto-analyze customer service show more calls, Google's driver-less cars, and a future of computer-filled Rx and other medical tasks. show less