Moe Beitiks  BOOK REVIEW: $20 per Gallon  by , 10/01/13
sustainable design, green design, book review, $20 per gallon,
christopher steiner, oil, alternative energy  We have to admit
that when we saw the title of Christopher Steiner’s book, we
scoffed a bit. Twenty dollars per a gallon of gas seems like an
outrageous, unfathomable price, even when you’re a believer in
peak oil. But part of the beauty of Steiner’s book is its
ability to track the effects of ever-more-scarce oil in
believable detail. Whether the author’s predictions of local
food, high-speed trains and alternative plastics are correct,
they are excellent illustrations of the pervasiveness of
petroleum.   Steiner doesn’t drop you straight into a oil-
expensive world: he eases you into it by dollar amounts,
painting a picture of the world at $6, $8, $10 a gallon. It
probably won’t be a straight line of ever-increasing prices,
but, Steiner argues, rise they will, and the systems we’ve built
on the assumption of cheap fuel will adapt or die as a res