The price of oil and other stories

I randomly checked out Steiner's book $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better from NYPL one day I was perusing the first floor nonfiction in the Mid-Manhattan library. Although I enjoyed reading about the different effects the inevitable climb of oil prices would have on our economies and our lives, I was ultimately a bit disappointed at the light and perhaps overly optimistic conclusions, the awkward ordering and thin analysis, and lastly the bouncy, overused journalistic prose--what Nicholas Nassim Taleb has termed "the journalistic prevarications of contemporary narrative nonfiction".

Leaving aside the "clear April morning"s and such, perhaps the most obvious hole is, perhaps intentionally, the total political havoc the increase in the cost of oil will cause, at least in this country. Truth be told leaving this out may be a good decision, because that is a whole set of different books, and this one is focusing on the economic effects. Even there, though, Steiner doesn't go far enough. He outlined his and others' predictions--clearly, I will say, and sometimes convincingly--but sometimes the proposed solutions are either, as I said, overly optimistic, or flat-out impossible.

For example, Steiner describes how the airline industry will shrink, and how the rail system will expand as oil prices climb. That was done well. However, getting to the automobile industry, the same misconceptions and misinformation that plague current pop mechanics about the future of automobiles plague Steiner's work. The truth is hydrogen vehicles are and will remain a fiction, because there is no known way to cost-effectively mass-produce, or re-engineer, a true replacement to the automobile as we know it--too many of its actual components (resins, chemicals, plastics), if not its fuel, depend on the existence of cheap petroleum. Steiner does not address this issue. Nor does he address the problem with hydrogen, mainly that it is also a fossil fuel (manufactured from natural gas), but also that it is vastly difficult to transport and store.

As a side note, I also felt the order Steiner chose--six-dollar gas, eight-dollar gas, et cetera, up to twenty-dollar gas--was not only rather strangely conceived but also skirted the issue of thirty-, forty-, fifty-dollar gas, and so on. I would have preferred organisation according to sector. Also, I would have preferred to know what happens beyond twenty-dollar gas. Granted that at twenty-dollar gas, a barrel of oil will cost something like $400, which may well be beyond the plateau of what the marketplace will feasibly accept. However, many indispensable items will still continue to be manufactured exclusively from oil, especially most types of plastics, medicines, and chemicals. There is no replacement for petroleum in the foreseeable future, and as long as oil is recoverable somewhere, recovered it shall be. Even as a barrel soars past the $500 mark.

Still, I laud Steiner's effort as one of the first serious investigations into perhaps the most pressing issue the world economy will face this century. Already we can see workarounds popping up, which is heartening, and Steiner does a good job of expanding on those that are known, and sheds light on some that are not as ubiquitous.