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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.”
― Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

“Over two years, the Chinese Development Bank extended $47 billion in credit to keep money-losing Chinese companies afloat.”
― 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 2050, natural gas demand is estimated to be 60 percent higher than it is today.”
― 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

“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

“Xi Jinping is of a new generation—the first Chinese leader born after World War II. His father, a veteran of the revolution, had risen to vice premier, before being purged and imprisoned.”
― Daniel Yergin, The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations