The Top 10 Changes in a Future of High Gas Prices
1. America will become skinnier and healthier in a future of high gas prices – and fewer of us will die on highways. There are proven correlations between the low price of gasoline and America’s obesity rate. When the price of gas rises to $6, more than 20,000 lives will be saved from obesity-related diseases. A similar effect takes place on our roads where more than 15,000 lives will be spared thanks to gas prices of $6 per gallon.
2. Have airline miles on United and American? Get rid of them. These carriers, along with Delta and most other familiar names, will disappear in a world of higher gasoline prices.
3. Get a plug, a big plug, in your garage. Garages will, in the not-too-distant future, be dominated by cars drawing their main propulsion from electrons that come through our power lines rather than petroleum that comes from the Middle East.
4. Do you live along the furthest edges of the suburbs? Is your commute measured in hours? Is your hometown without a train station? Then it may be time to move. The future will not be kind to places built exclusively around the automobile. Towns of the future will be eminently more walkable, sustainable and, for most people, more comfortable than our big-box centered towns now.
5. Looking for stock picks? Go with companies laying detailed plans for a future of using less petroleum; these companies will be the ones that prosper in the long term. UPS, for example, is experimenting with fully electric trucks in Manhattan and London, as well as exploring trucks that run on pressurized hydraulic fluid rather than gasoline.
6. Subway tunnels will burrow their ways underneath most large cities in America, piercing virgin ground in some cases and expanding existing networks in others. High gas prices will lead to a renaissance of America’s mass transit systems and return us to the gilded era of subways, street cars and trolleys. Central cities left for dead, or at least comatose, such as Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, will revive and prosper as the urban model—one supported by proper infrastructure—becomes indispensable.
7. Much of your food will come from within a few hundred miles of your house rather than within a few continents. As the price of gasoline rises, it will shorten the paths of our food from its creation to our mouths. No longer will Norwegian Salmon go from where they’re caught in the North Sea to China for processing and packing and then back to Scandinavian supermarkets to consumers who have no idea their “local” fish have global traveling credentials.
8. Wal-Mart’s global empire will crumble. With 6,000 suppliers, 80% of whom are in China, and more than 7,000 trucks moving this stuff from distribution centers to stores throughout the U.S., the company’s network it built on gasoline. Wal-Mart’s model of leveraging low-cost labor to produce ultra-cheap goods in far-flung places has been built with the assumption of cheap gasoline, an assumption that will prove fatal.
9. A high-speed train network will course through America’s forests, its deserts and its croplands, connecting cities like Chicago to New York and Seattle to Los Angeles. Our high-speed train network will usurp a tattered airline industry and put the U.S. back in the vanguard of train transport, where it resided until the 1930s.
10. Potpourri: The shrinking of the Las Vegas strip; the disappearance of plastic bags; the death of Disney World; the grand resurgence of American manufacturing; the greening of America’s roofs and universal road tolling.