BART is getting extensions to its service (though still not anywhere close to it was original envisioned in the 1970s) and there's a bullet train in the works.īut my experience in the Bay Area is no more representative to the entire country than the author's is. The local gas and electric utility offers us online monitoring of our usage and incentives to conserve. Parking lots are starting to install solar panels on their roof tops. Cars have gotten smaller and hatchbacks are in vogue again (having last been popular in the early 1990s). Plastic consumption is down where I live (though mostly to avoid litter, rather than to save on petrol).
Looking locally, since gasoline prices have wobbled between $3 and $5.50 a gallon for about the last ten years, there have been a number of changes. Yes, there were still a bunch of SUVs (parents, duped into believing they needed them to safely cart their kids around. Gasoline even at its cheapest in the 1990s was never as slow in California as it was the midwest. Much of this change was forced by the automobile industry, pushing busses and personal automobiles.īut the book assumes a very homogenous American lifestyle. Of course the American rail system both long distance and intercity was largely gutted starting the 1940s and ending in the 1970s with the creation of Amtrak. Air travel will be de-emphasized for other forms: like trains and perhaps ships. Transportation will need to be reinvented, or retooled. The idea of the book is to show just how dependent the modern American lifestyle is on petroleum, from transportation, to plastics, to lighting and heating, and so forth.
The chapters are divided up by price ranges, starting with relatively small price increases and then much larger ones. $20 Per Gallon by Christopher Steiner looks at what the rising price of oil will do the average American lifestyle. The Long War by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxterġ607: A New Look at Jamestown by Karen E. Jane Vows Vengeance by Michael Thomas Ford
The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline by Nancy Springer Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Rift, Part 1 by Gene Luen Yangīrewster's Millions by George Barr McCutcheon
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