Could $20-Per-Gallon Gasoline Make Us Happier?

NPR, July 16, 2009

When it's time to fill up the gas tank, many fear the price of gas will return to the $4-a-gallon days of last summer.
But according to author Chris Steiner, our lives would be a lot happier and healthier if gas prices rose into the double digits.
Steiner explains himself, and the title of his book: $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline will Change Our Lives for the Better.

Excerpt from book:

There's something guttural, something personal, about the price of gas. Even though we've pared our driving, there's a feeling that there's more to this, more than $2 versus $4, more than the price of our weekly fill-up. At the gas pump, we're egregiously offended by big numbers and comforted by small ones. Big numbers make us sick. But why?
The price of commodities, the price of nearly everything we use in abundance, has shot up in the last five years. So what makes gasoline so special? We don't have the same visceral reaction to, say, the price of grain - even though it goes into half of everything we eat and its price has more than doubled in recent years. Why does gasoline set off different, shriller alarms than other things we consistently buy? Perhaps that's our human intuition - an evolved sense that there's more to a situation than the mere face of it. It turns out that our intuition, honed by millennia of survival, is quite canny. The inexorable rising price at the pump represents several worlds of change beyond smaller cars and cumbersome gas station charges.
The price of oil - and thus, gasoline - affects our lives to a degree few realize. It's not just the BP or Shell portion of your Visa bill. It's the bricks in your walls, the plastic in your refrigerator, the asphalt on your roads, the shingles on your roof, the synthetic rubber in your ball. With every penny that gasoline moves up, so, too, does the price of most things we consume. Stop what you're doing. Look around. Look at your desk, at your shoes, at your shirt, at your windows, your kitchen - how much of it comes from oil? More than you think. Look out you window - look out at the world - how much of it owes its existence to oil? Again, more than you think. The United States imports 67% of its oil, but only 40% of that goes into our vehicles' fuel tanks. The rest is used to make, fortify, and shape just about anything you can imagine.
But there's more to this than the price of our stuff. The mounting cost of gas will dictate cultural changes, housing changes, civic changes, education changes - it will leave nary a sport on the globe, or how we live, unchanged. There will be pain involved in our adaptaions, yes, but not all of the change we face is gloomy. In fact, many people's lives, including many Americans' lives, will be improved across a panoply of facets. We will get more exercise, breathe fewer toxins, eat better food, and make a smaller impact on our earth. Giant businesses will rise as entrepreneurs' intrepid minds elegantly solve our society's mounting challenges. The world's next Google or Microwoft, the next great disrupter and megacompany, could well be conceived in this saga. It could be a battery company, a breakthough solar outfit, or a radically innovative vehicle manufacturer. This revolution will be so widespread and affect so many that it will evoke the Internet's rise in the late 1990s.
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