Christopher Steiner just came out with a book called $20 Per Gallon which asks and answers the simple question, "what will change in our lives when gas is $X/gallon?" I read the book on my patio, watching cars in the drive-through all day at the Jack in the Box behind my place. Here are some of his predictions at each $/gallon amount.

* $6: The SUV dies for good, more toll roads, fewer yellow school buses, more police on foot patrol.
* $8: The skies will empty as airlines go out of business. A few key airlines will remain to service longer flights from key hubs. We will travel less, families will live closer together, resort towns will be emptier, Disney World will close, Las Vegas will be much smaller.
* $10: UPS will put a lot of electric delivery trucks on the road; fewer people will drive and those that can afford it will likely have recently purchased an electric car; snowmobiles, ATVs, and jet skies will be used only for emergency and work duties rather than recreation; there will be shift toward biodegradable plastics made from plants.
* $12: Urban revolution and suburban decay as people move to North Park, um, I mean, places where they don't have to drive to school, work, & shopping; subways will be built; US zoning laws will change.
* $14: Big box stores in small towns will close; towns on rivers or railroad lines will do better than the rest; small town main streets will be revived; American manufacturing will be return; we will generate less waste as a way to reduce garbage collection costs; important roads will be paved with concrete instead of asphalt; many other roads will close; oil-based plastics will be recycled with vigor.
$16: Produce will be grown by farms located on the perimeters of cities; foods that can be stored (grains, etc.) will be regional or grown near railroad routes; food will not be shipped half way around the world; sushi restaurants will close; ammonia fertilizer will be produced from water using wind power.
$18: A rail network will be built, the military will use fuel more efficiently and use new technologies.
$20: Systems that produce heat as a byproduct will use that heat to generate electricity or to heat buildings. Hydro electric, wind, geothermal, and solar will be important. Most energy will come from nuclear power.

In his book, he paints a picture that is a cross between the nostalgic past and a world of technology. It's, in fact, a very positive picture. Also, it's vision is based on how much things cost, not on ideals or ethics, which I think makes it much more likely. Below is a passage from his book, but first, here's a question to think about.

"Going through your day, what would you change if you knew that gas prices were going to increase drastically in the coming years?"

Sometime in the Twenty-First Century, Brooklyn, New York

Bill lives in a world where gasoline, where it can be found, costs $20 per gallon. In Bill's world, the price of gas no longer rules our conversations. In fact, the price of gas isn't even in the conversation. It's a non issue. Nobody buys the stuff, hardly, so nobody cares. In Bill's world the weather is again at the top of pedestrian gabbing fare. Nobody talks about how, last week, they filled their tank only halfway because it's all they could afford. Nor do people talk about how awesome it was to fill their tank for a mere $15. In Bill's world, there are no tanks and everything is already full, all the time.

At twenty-seven years old, Bill is typical for an American his age. He last rode in an airplane fifteen years ago and he doubts he'll ever cross the threshold of another airport gate ever again. And he doesn't care. He travels frequently, but always by high-speed train. He often rides the train two hours to visit his parents in Pittsburgh. His father enjoys regaling him with tales of airports and trips to New York that took the family six hours door to door. It all sounds so ridiculous to Bill, the schlepping, the airports, the delays, the baggage hassles. But he appreciates his dad's amazement with the nation's train network, even if he sees it as just a utility that's always been there for him as an adult.

Bill rides the train for an hour to see his sister in Boston or for two hours for a weekend getaway on the French streets of Montreal. When he's on the go, and that's fairly often, Bill expects to be sitting, or sometimes standing, on a train before anything else, whether it's in a subway car or train.

Like 70% of the people his age, Bill has never owned a car. Gasoline cars are around, but he doesn't ride in them too often. There are just as many electric cars plying the streets of his city now, too. But owning one of these, while attractive and a bit glamorous, isn't cheap and just isn't needed. His Chicagoan brother doesn't own a car nor does his Boston-living sister. Non of them, in fact, ever expects to own a car. Bill's parents, who live in the Mount Lebanon area of Pittsburgh, own a small electric sedan that they love, but Bill's father keeps making noises that they'll ditch their car, the garage, and the house and move into central Pittsburgh, which is once again a bustling, vibrant city core that would have reminded Bill's late grandfather of the city's glory days decades ago.

When Bill rides the train through the New Jersey landscape to the west or the near update terrain to the north, he passes by acre after acre of produce farms. Some of this land, just twenty years ago, teemed with cheap subdivisions. Some of it boasted corn and grain crops. But now this land supplies New York and its close-by neighbors with tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, cucumbers, spinach, romaine, and just about anything Bill might find in the fresh produce aisle at his neighborhood shop. The high-speed train line is shadowed by a normal freight line that brings the vegetables and fruit into the city every day. The same ring of farms surrounds all U.S. towns now, big and small. Food, for Bill, has almost always been local. America farms as much as it ever has, but its crops are spread evenly around the country, distributed regionally rather than nationally. Illinois grows less corn and has more wheat, apples, greenhouses, and potatoes. California, conversely, grows more corn and wheat while cranking out fewer avocados and citrus fruit. Food is just too expensive when it has to be shipped cross-country.

Bill lives in a four-story building in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. It's an old building, built near the beginning of the twentieth century, but it pulses with technology. Bill's hot water and half of his electricity come from solar panels on the building's roof and upper walls. The solar panels operate a system that mimics the photosynthesis process in plants. The energy harnessed by the cells during the day can be used by the homes at night thanks to a fuel cell.

Flat roofs in New York, Pittsburgh, California, or anywhere else, that aren't used for solar cells often have gardens or grass installed. Six inches of dirt nourishing an overhead collection of plants helps keep buildings insulated in the winter and cool in the summer. The green roofs displace less water, which helps keep sewage plants from being overwhelmed while their insulating effects allow power pants to produce less electricity. Many homes, including many walk-up buildings in New York City, boast extensive produce gardens on their roofs. The gardens are often maintained by a tranche of companies that have cropped up solely for the purpose of keeping the building's inhabitants deep in sustainable and fresh vegetables six months of the year. It's the ultimate supply-chain reduction.

When Bill turns on anything in his house that's sucking power from an outlet, he can track its exact power usage down to the hundredths of kilowatt-hours. In a $20 world, many homes in America will be equipped with an energy-monitoring system. Bill can track the usage of each light socket and outlet throughout his apartment. He knows that watching that last hour of television cost him 80 cents. These systems, in a $20 world, have been mandated in places like the Northeast and California to help consumers conserve energy and prevent grid blackouts. The strategy has worked brilliantly; when people can see exactly what it cost them to leave that extra light or that unwatched television on, they quickly wise up, encouraged by savings they can see and realize instantaneously.

When Bill gets outside his apartment door and locks the bolt from the outside, the electric lock relays the signal to the home's interlinked electric system, extinguishing all the lights and turning off the air-conditioning systems. During times of peak demand, a small LED light glows on all the light switches and outlets in Bill's flat, reminding him that electricity is more expensive at that moment. Little prods like that help American homes in a world of $20 gas use 50% less energy per capita than they did in a world of $2 gas.

In his kitchen, Bill brews tea heated by the energy of the sun. Bill's kitchen cups are not plastic made from oil, but plastic made from the sugar of a corn plant grown in Ohio. The spent water from Bill's building is recycled to flush toilets or to water back- and front yard plants. Bill jobs in athletics shirts made of finely knit wool, not polyester, which is used less and less because of its high cost. Bill's running shoes have natural rubber bottoms -as in tree rubber- since the composite petro-based materials that used to be made from petroleum and were so common in the past's sneakers are all but forgotten. Bill's street has been paved with concrete as part of New York's plan to get its small streets on a twenty year pavement plan.

Without as much car traffic, the streets can survive longer. If they're concrete, they can withstand the rigors of winter better than asphalt, which has seen its main advantage, cheapness, erode. Along the concrete streets, New York installs fee-based electrical outlets for the charging of cars. Trolley cars have returned to the streets of Brooklyn, Chicago, Sacramento, and dozens of other towns, serving as bridges between some cities' subway deprived warrens and their newly expanded, glistening and efficient underground lines. During rush hour, when the trolleys come frequently, people boarding a trolley car can usually see another car up the street within two blocks and one down the street within the same distance.

Bill lives in the original heart of American urban density, but 90% of Americans also call high-density urban centers home now. City land speculators have struck it rich while exurbian landlords have been ruined.

Bill's girlfriend wears lipstick made from argan oil from a Moroccan ironwood tree rather than petroleum. Bill's wine, and most wines, come in boxed membranes that take far less energy to produce than glass bottles. Much of Bill's newer furniture, his flooring, and some of his summertime barbecue wares - biodegradable plates, knives, and forks - are made of bamboo shoots and fibers that come from plantations in Florida and Texas. The bamboo plant builds mass more prodigiously than a tree could ever dream of and has, along with bioplastics, helped replace many oil-based plastics around the house.

Bill works for a company that designs tidal power stations all over the world. Such installations can be seen all along the East and West Coasts now, as well as much of the developed coastline in the world. The seas' constant swirl is an energy source that, once an efficient method for harnessing it came about, could not be ignored. Bill's job is one of millions that have been created for a new world built on a new energy paradigm, one that's not centered on oil, but instead on a multitude of energies coming from things as disparate as the earth's molten core to the sun coming from the center of our solar system.

Bill's gig owes its existence directly to innovative companies that, during the last twenty years, have been powering our rapid tap dance of adaptation as our oil use diminishes. The global economy, once powered by crude, is now powered by trade in materials and devices to capture and preserve the energy we have. Cargo ships still cross the oceans, but not with the rush-hour regularity of before. Now they're full of solar arrays, wind turbines, massive batteries, millions of electric cars, and thousands of new high-speed train parts.

In Bill's world, cargo ships have evolved into gargantuan nuclear-powered islands that measure 4,000 feet long and 400 feet high, and weigh more than 1 million tons. The Queen Mary 2, by comparison, sits at 1,100 feet long and weighs 150,000 tons. These new ships' cavernous bellies will be ten times larger than the standard container ships of today. These massive ships evolved not out of additional amounts of international trade, but out of exorbitant diesel prices. These ships will revive trade between the world's giant economies after some aspects of globalization were stymied by the high costs of moving anything. Many people now take trendy cruises to cross the Atlantic in four days on a nuclear-powered megacruise ship rather than pay twice as much to fly. European vacations don't disappear for Americans, but they come less often, and when they do, they last two or three weeks rather than just one.

These nuclear ships will be, in Bill's $20 existence, the latest manifestation of nuclear power's democratization. The United State's current policy of keeping nuclear power away from anybody but our closest allies will be incompatible in a world of rapidly expanding energy demand and decreasing crude oil supplies. Hundreds of new nuclear plants will dot the globe from South America to the Middle East to Southeast Asia. The multinational companies that build these reactors, such as GE, will revel in a worldwide nuclear renaissance. The reactors will be built to generate as little high-level nuclear fodder, the stuff of nuclear bombs, as possible, but tight international policing will still be needed. The world won't have any other choice, as these changes will be dictated from an economic pulpit, not from an emotional one.

The future energy world, and hence, the modern world, will be ruled by strict efficiency metrics, not mere it-works-so-don't-fit-it methodologies. The world's route to energy equilibrium will be determined by sets of equations that determine utility, worth, and function. The same equations will replace our gluttonous American model for life with an elegant one, a model so innovative that our world, while recognizable, will be far, far from the same. These energy equations will render McMansions defunct and SUVs dinosaurs. These equations will fill our ridges with wind turbines and thin cars from our roads. These equations aren't expressed through indecipherable statistics, but through one simple modern idiom: dollars per gallon.