Daniel Yergin > Quotes

“A wise old owl lived in an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard, Why aren’t we all like that old bird?”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“A lesson in bringing about true changes of mind and heart comes from a Japanese functionary. By day, he crunched numbers that showed his country was approaching imminent energy crisis and helped to craft policy. By night, he weaved a novel in which a bureaucrat-hero helps see the country through to new energy sources. When the crisis came faster than he expected, he actually put the novel away because he did not want to make the burden of his countrymen worse. When the short-term crisis passed, he published his novel. It's phenomenal and well-timed success fueled the vision that inspired difficult change and maintained a sense of urgency.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“The United States generates less than 1 percent of the plastic waste in oceans. About 90 percent of river-sourced plastic pollution in the oceans comes from uncontrolled dumping into ten rivers in Asia and Africa, which, if properly managed, could dramatically reduce the wastage. Plastic bags and straws may be the most visible use of plastics, but they constitute less than 2 percent of plastics.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“The Western world, he believed, was afflicted by the curse of short-term thinking, the inevitable result of democracy.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Oil men, like producers of other raw materials, could not continue to sell their products below cost...For prices to be raised, production had to be controlled, and to bring production under control, Ickes began with an all-out campaign against the "hot oiler,"...This bootleg oil was secretly siphoned off from pipelines, hidden in camouflaged tanks that were covered with weeds, moved about both in an intrcate network of secret pipelines and by trucks, and then smuggled across state borders at night.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“The battlefields of World War I established the importance of petroleum as an element of national power when the internal combustion machine overtook the horse and the coal-powered locomotive.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“An important United Nations environmental conference went past 6:00 in the evening when the interpreters' contracted working conditions said they could leave. They left, abandoning the delegates unable to talk to each other in their native languages. The French head of the committee, who had insisted on speaking only in French throughout the week suddenly demonstrated the ability to speak excellent English with English-speaking delegates.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

“In August 1946, exactly one year after the end of World War II, a tanker sailed into the port of Philadelphia laden with 115,000 barrels of oil for delivery to a local refinery. The cargo, loaded a month earlier in Kuwait, was described at the time as the first significant “shipment of Middle East oil to the United States.” Two years later, Saudi oil was imported for the first time, in order, said the U.S. buyer, “to meet the demand for petroleum products in the United States.”1 That year—1948—marked an historic turning point. The United States had not only been a net exporter of oil, but for many years the world’s largest exporter, by far. Six out of every seven barrels of oil used by the Allies during World War II came from the United States. But now the country was becoming a net importer of oil. By the late 1940s, with a postwar economic boom and car-dependent suburbs spreading out, domestic oil consumption was outrunning domestic supplies.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“The first energy transition began in Britain in the thirteenth century with the shift from wood to coal. Rising populations and destruction of forests made wood scarce and expensive, and coal came to be used for heating in London, despite fumes and smell.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“Ride hailing does not necessarily mean few total miles driven. On the contrary, it can well mean increased mileage driven, as the accessibility and convenience stimulate more usage of vehicles—fewer people taking the bus or the subway and more people in individual cars, albeit driven by someone else.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“Simplicity rules everything worth while, and whenever I have been up against a business proposition which, after taking thought, I could not reduce to simplicity, I have realized that it was hopelessly wrong and I have let it alone.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“The author points to the impact of what he called Dutch disease, where the discovery of found wealth from a particular commodity causes a culture to atrophy with respect to work ethic and broader development. Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Once upon a time, automobiles were central to romantic life. It was once estimated that almost 40 percent of marriages in America were proposed in automobiles. Today, a third of marriages result from meeting up online and through dating apps.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“In 1983, 92 percent of those between the ages of twenty and twenty-four had a driver’s license; by 2018, that number was down to 80 percent.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“In August 2018, Yamal LNG dispatched its first cargo to China, going east along the Arctic coast, through the ice of the Northern Sea Route. Yamal LNG had come in on time and on budget. The Financial Times observed another noteworthy aspect of the project. “No other business venture,” it said, “better illustrates Russia’s resilience in the face of international sanctions.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“Mastery itself was the prize of the venture.”1”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

“Leonid Mikhelson, the CEO of the independent Russian company Novatek, was determined to develop LNG export capacity in the north of the Yamal Peninsula. The main inhabitants of this barely populated region are several thousand Nenets, partly nomadic people who move with their reindeer herds, which they supplement by hunting polar bears. In the language of the Nenets, “Yamal” means “end of the land,” and that is what the remote northern part of the peninsula literally is—a harsh, vast, bleak, and treeless land that juts out into the forbidding ice pack of the Arctic Ocean and is underlaid by permafrost.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“For a specific date in the first energy transition—coal’s becoming a distinctive industrial fuel, superior to wood—January 1709 could well do. That month, Abraham Darby, an English metalworker and Quaker entrepreneur, working his blast furnace in a village called Coalbrookdale, figured out a way to remove impurities from coal, thus turning it into coke, a higher-carbon version of coal. The coke replaced charcoal, which is partly-burned wood, and had been the standard fuel for smelting. Darby was convinced, he said, “that a more effective means of iron production may be achieved.” He was also ridiculed. “There are many who doubt me foolhardy,” he said. But his method worked.1 Though it took a few decades to spread, Darby’s innovation lowered the cost of smelting iron, making iron much more available for industrial uses, helping to spur the Industrial Revolution.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“Here is where the electric car can gain traction. While an electric car may cost more, its operating costs will be lower because the costs of electricity per mile will be lower than that for gasoline (unless internal combustion engines become much more efficient). So if you’re running a massive fleet of cars that is working most of the time, the electric car becomes compelling. Moreover, the recharging conundrum can be solved with a central charging location.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“What, then, is the future of the $5 trillion global oil and gas industry that supplies almost 60 percent of world energy? The industry will continue to need to find and develop another three to five billion barrels a year just to make up for the natural decline in oil fields, which happens after a field has been in production for some time. The International Energy Agency estimates that over $20 trillion of investment in oil and gas development will be required over the next two decades.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“Europe now has more than thirty receiving terminals for LNG, which can be ramped up on short notice. They are also part of an increasingly dense global network. Worldwide, over forty countries now import LNG, compared to just eleven in 2000. Exporting countries have increased from twelve to twenty. Overall global LNG demand in 2019 was almost four times larger than in 2000, and liquefaction capacity is expected to increase by another 30 percent over the next half decade. Methane molecules from a growing number of countries now jostle and compete with one another for customers across the globe.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“As they grow, wind and solar and EVs will need “big shovels” to meet their increasing call on mined minerals and land itself. It is estimated that an onshore wind turbine requires fifteen hundred tons of iron, twenty-five hundred tons of concrete, and forty-five tons of plastic. About half a million pounds of raw materials have to be mined and processed to make a battery for an electric car.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“The “triad”—the convergence of electric vehicles, ride hailing, and self-driving cars—is far from sure. It will take electrics a long time to catch up with gasoline-powered cars as a share of the fleet. People may continue to want to own cars and drive themselves. Autonomous vehicles at scale are far from proved.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“By 1898, Russia overtook the United States to become the world’s biggest petroleum producer.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“domestic production. Yet the concern about Russia’s potential leverage from gas exports does not fully recognize how much both the European and world gas markets have changed. The gas market in Europe has become a real market of buyers and sellers, rather than a system based on inflexible long-term contracts.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“For Xi, the Communist Party is paramount and central, the defining organizing principle for China’s rise, and its discipline and control are essential.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“We have got to find a a new plan of attacking it. Something that will show clearly not only the magnitude of the industries and commercial developments, and the changes they have brought in various parts of the country, but something which will make clear the great principles by which industrial leaders are combining and controlling these resources. ”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Germany’s Energiewende, the “energy turn”—which aimed to replace conventional energy with wind and solar. The generous subsidies from the feed-in tariffs speeded renewable deployment, while also leading to the highest residential energy prices in the European Union.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

“President Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would pose a “red line” that would trigger an American military response. In August 2013, word filtered out that Assad’s forces had used poison gas against a rebel suburb of Damascus, killing as many as fourteen hundred people. This was a key moment. The United States was just a few hours away from launching airstrikes. “Our finger was on the trigger,” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later said.13 Obama decided otherwise. He concluded that airpower would be insufficient and ineffective, and he wanted congressional authorization but could not get it. He had come into office to end America’s two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—and he was loath to slip into a third, with no clear path to success. Air power in Libya had helped remove Gadhafi, but it had left chaos behind. Obama was also demonstrating that, as he later said, he had broken with the military response “playbook” of the “foreign policy establishment.” Moreover, he feared that an air strike would not eliminate all the chemical weapons, and Assad could then claim that “he had successfully defied the United States.”14 Still, an American president had said using chemical weapons was a red line, but had not acted on that. Coming on top of Mubarak, it made leaders in other countries question the credibility of the United States and its reliability as an ally.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations