What if gas cost $10 a gallon?

By Shirley Skeel

Editor's note: This is one in an occasional series of financial what-ifs.

In four years, U.S. gas prices have doubled to more than $3.70 a gallon, and crude oil has tripled to around $125 a barrel. Allowing for inflation, that's higher than prices were during the 1978–83 oil shock that triggered a recession and sky-high interest rates. But . . .

What if gas cost $10 a gallon?

Thousands of truckers would go bankrupt. Airplanes would sit idle in hangars. Restaurants and stores would shut down. Car-pooling, hybrid vehicles, scooters and inline skates would swing into vogue. And telecommuting, rooftop vegetable gardens, home cooking and recycling would proliferate.

• Talk back: Who still says 'Fill it up'?

Yes, it would be painful. At $10 a gallon, filling a Ford Explorer could cost $225. Even gassing up a Honda Civic could set you back $132.

And suddenly the bus wouldn't look so bad.

A large recession, not a depression

According to Todd Hale, a senior vice president for consumer researcher Nielsen, at $10 a gallon, the average family's gas bill would leap from 16% of its retail spending to about 40%. People would drive less, yes. But many have to drive to work or the supermarket, and they'd cough up the cash -- screaming all the way -- and cut back elsewhere.

(Above right: Use the calculator to see what your yearly gas bill would look like as prices increase.)

Businesses and farmers, meantime, would be squeezed as the costs of transport, petrochemical fertilizers and plastics rose. If an oil shock came quickly, sending gas to $10 a gallon and oil to roughly $350 a barrel, the chain reaction of spiraling prices and sliced consumer demand would hit us hard.

• MSN Autos: Find the cheapest gas in your ZIP code

"It would be a large recession, not a depression," says Michael Englund, the chief economist for Action Economics in Boulder, Colo. That would mean tight budgets and unemployment until the economy adapted and growth returned.

Here are some likely effects:

• Consumer spending on eating out, clothing, electronics, vacations and other little luxuries would fall sharply. A Nielsen study found that even at recent gas prices, 41% of consumers were eating out less. In total, 18% of those surveyed were cutting spending to a "great degree." That would bruise companies such as Applebee's, Macy's, Gap, Best Buy and others. But discount retailers, particularly those selling food and gas, could do relatively well. Think Costco, Wal-Mart and McDonald's.

• We'd see "a lot of parked planes," says Bill Swelbar, an air transport engineer for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The U.S. airline industry pays out $465 million in fuel costs for every $1 rise in oil. At $350-a-barrel oil, the industry would pay more than $100 billion extra, almost as much as last year's total airfare sales. Even if airlines ratcheted up fares 50%, half of their airplanes would be grounded because they'd be too expensive to fly, Swelbar reckons.

• Many independent truckers, who pay for their own fuel, would go bankrupt as their costs soared and shippers switched to barges and trains. Taxis and FedEx would be strictly for the well-heeled. And home pizza deliveries would cease. Pizza delivery drivers also pay for their own gas. "It'd be brutal," says Joseph Miller, an assistant manager at a Domino's Pizza in Seattle. "I would think we wouldn't have any drivers."

• Food prices could jump by a third or more, experts estimate. About 80 cents of the $4.50 retail cost of a box of cornflakes goes to transport it, says Dan Basse, the president of AgResource, a Chicago research company. On top of that, there's the cost of fertilizers to grow the corn and diesel for farm equipment. In 2005, transportation and energy made up 8.5% of all retail food costs, but energy was far cheaper then. As $10 gas pushed up food prices, pinched consumers would give up pricey fresh meat and vegetables for cheap pastas and oils. Ranchers and dairies with energy-hungry milking barns would struggle. And cities might sprout to life as people planted vegetable gardens on their roofs and balconies and in vacant lots.

• Plastics for appliances, packaging, pacemakers and myriad other products would jump in price as the natural gas that plastic is made with rose in value alongside oil. Bill Wood, the president of Mountaintop Economics and Research in Massachusetts, says shoppers would have a choice: "Paper or paper?" Small plastic bottles of water would disappear. Glass and metal containers would make a comeback. And recycling would explode. Families might even have nine bins in the hall to separate their trash, as they do in Japan, where consumer recycling tops 90%.

• As drivers began to switch to 100-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrid cars (already expected to launch by 2010), the electricity grid could come under strain. Theoretically, if everyone had one and plugged it in at night, the grid could handle 84% of the nation's car fleet. But to avoid the risk of city brownouts, the grid capacity would have to rise. Solar, wave and wind power would ramp up. Giant solar thermal power plants, which use mirrors to concentrate the sun's energy, would be built. But in the rush to get power, we'd probably also step up the use of cheap, dirty coal (50% of our electricity generation now). Even nuclear power (21%) could be considered anew.

• Resistance to drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and off California would shrink. Environmentalists might stand their ground. But as James Williams, an energy economist for WTRG Economics in Arkansas, says, "Let's put it this way: Y'all wanna drive?" Oil reserves in both areas are thought to be more than 10 billion barrels, double the proven reserves in Texas. That would help feed America's 21-million-barrel-a-day appetite.

Continued: It might be good in the long run

READ MORE: GAS PRICES - CHEAP GAS - GAS REBATE - OIL

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