Commentary: Expensive gas will "change our lives for the better"

[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/07/27/am.intv.steiner.art.jpg caption="Steiner says today's cheap fill ups aren't going to last."]

Last summer, people parked their cars and decided to get rid of their SUVs. They walked, they biked and they car-pooled because gas soared to four bucks a gallon nationwide. A lot of people are wondering how high it will go. Now AAA says the national average is $2.50 today.

Christopher Steiner is a senior staff reporter at Forbes and wrote the book ‘$20 per gallon’ about the inevitable rise in gas and how it’s going to change our lives for the better. He spoke with CNN’s Kiran Chetry Monday.

Kiran Chetry: How do you convince people to worry about the price of gasoline when it's relatively low? It was $4 last year and now on average it’s $2.50 a gallon

Christopher Steiner: Well some people you can't convince to worry. As economies recover across the world and we get these 2 billion people that are going enter the global middle class for the next 30 years, right now there’s only a billion around the globe. The price of oil will go up, it's inevitable.

Chetry: You talk about the growing middle class in China and India. How are they going to affect the world as we know it in terms of gasoline usage?

Steiner: Those people want to live the same types of lives we already have. China just passed the United States as the largest car market in the world during the first half of 2009. That's an amazing thing. If someone had told you that was going to happen ten years ago, you would have thought they were nuts.

Chetry: Another interesting thing that you wrote about in your book, when we talk about how gas is a natural resource, it’s not an infinite resource. For every six gallons of gas we use we only take one out of the ground.

Steiner: For every six barrels we use we only find one. So we're using at a much greater rate than we're finding because we found most of the good oil.

Chetry: Also the process it takes for us to get gasoline now is much harder. So how does it translate to the person at home who’s driving an SUV, who wants to be able to drive what they want and is paying $2.50 a gallon right now?

Steiner: It's hard to force people to change when life is so easy at $2.50. What you're going to see is people aren't going to change their lives until they have a reason to and that reason is the price of gas. When people think about tomorrow, if they got up and the price of gas was three times as much, would they drive as far to go to work? Would they be willing to drive their kids as far? Would they be willing to live in the same town as they live in now? The answer for a lot of people is no.

Chetry: You talk about the psychological tipping point at $6 a gallon. When do you think that we will see $6 a gallon?

Steiner: I think that could happen the next three to four years. And the reason $6 is so important is we’ve already been to $4 and I don’t that would blow anybody away psychologically, though it certainly changed how we lived in America. Americans drove 100 billion less miles than the year before, which we never had a statistic like that ever before, and that was due to the $4 price of gas

Chetry: What about your subtitle, ‘It’s going to change our lives for the better.’ How is it going to be better if it costs us so much more money, if it takes that chunk out of our paychecks every month?

Steiner: Well there’s a bevy of reasons but it goes back to things like how we live. How we live is largely determined by where we live. And as we move denser you’re going to see obesity rates go down, our environment is going to clean up and we'll become more energy independent, we certainly won’t be totally energy independent but capitalism needs an incentive for people to develop alternative energies and that incentive eventually will be the price of gas.

Chetry: We talk about incentives. We still apparently don't have enough incentive to change it. It's interesting. We took a look at how the good and bad happen at different price points. What happens at $6 a gallon? You say the good part is the death of the SUV. Some people would say that's good, some people would say not so good. Los Angeles emerges from the smog and you say 15,600 lives are saved from people being off the roads.

Steiner: That's just from car crashes, the fatalities. We lose over 55,000 people a year on the roads and as prices go up we use fewer and fewer.

Chetry: When gas is $20 a gallon, you say 90% of people will live in cities, 70% of people will never own a car. But on the bad end of that, nuclear reactors power everything and polyester’s too expensive for clothes. Explain that.

Steiner: Polyester comes straight from gasoline. We'll find natural fibers to wear. I don't think anybody cares about that. But as we move to closer things, as we live more urbanely, we'll ride mass transportation. We will walk to work, we’ll walk to grocery stores and we’ll walk to school. That's how a lot of people already live.

Chetry: What happens to the suburbs?

Steiner: Suburbs? Far out ones? They probably turn back to farms. A lot of those homes are going to fall over.