The brighter side of expensive oil  

The FT has a review of Christopher Steiner's book "$20 Per Gallon: How the inevitable rise in the price of gasoline will change our lives for the better" - The brighter side of expensive oil.

It is often pointed out that if Martin Luther King’s most famous speech had declared: “I have a nightmare”, he would not have persuaded anyone.

He might not have sold very many books, either. There is only so much gloom the average reader can take, and today’s publishing climate is not receptive to Old Testament prophecies of imminent destruction.

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.

Expensive petrol, he suggests, will bring all sorts of benefits, from lower road deaths and less obesity to tastier, locally grown food. It could also mean the downfall of Wal-Mart and the “carnival of excess” that is Las Vegas: deaths that Mr Steiner does not seem inclined to mourn.

There will be costs, too, he admits: the bulk of the US aviation and motor industries is likely to join Wal-Mart in the history books. But overall his intent, as elegantly outlined in the epilogue, is that civilisation can survive – thanks in large part to nuclear power – and indeed flourish after the end of the Oil Age.

The book’s smartest trick is in its structure, which follows the lead of Six Degrees, Mark Lynas’s book on climate change, in casting each chapter as a step up on a numerical scale.

Starting at $4 per US gallon – the level reached last year, although we are now back to about $2.60 – the book counts petrol prices upwards in $2 increments, hypothesising about the social and economic changes that are likely at each level up to $20 per gallon. At $6 per gallon the SUVs will go the way of the dinosaurs, along with the industrial poetry of names such as Chevy Tahoe and Cadillac Escalade. At $8, it is cheap air travel that disappears, and so on.

The focus is unashamedly US-centric, as the title’s use of dollars and gallons makes clear. One of Mr Steiner’s most arresting insights is that cheap oil has built America the way it is, and expensive oil will make it much more like Europe.

Readers in Britain, where petrol already costs about $6.25 per US gallon, and was 30 per cent higher a year ago, will raise a wry smile at the prospect of the huge social changes resulting from its climb to the unprecedented heights of $8.