The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

Abstract

THE QUEST: ENERGY, SECURITY, AND THE REMAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD By Daniel Yergin, Penguin Press 2011 Daniel Yergin has done much for the reputation of oil as a central figure on the world stage over the course of the 20th Century. While others have chronicled the careers of those who developed and profited from the resource, Yergin gave the substance itself the starring role it deserves in his 1992 work, The Prize.1 Yergin won a Pulitzer for the book, and he deserved it for so well telling the story of oil's career as it rose from coal's less prominent cousin at the outset of 20th Century to its starring role as the world's predominant energy resource. Yergin's tale of oil's influence on world events includes the riveting back story leading to World War II, as Japanese naval strategists pressed for the attack on Pearl Harbor as a means of securing oil supplies in the Pacific. The Prize concluded with the rise of OPEC, and the profound resulting shift in the axis of world power, as developed nations adjusted to a new and relatively less self-sufficient reality. In The Quest,2 Yergin picks up the thread of the story in the latter part of the 20th Century, a time in which fossil fuels have shared the stage with other forms of energy more favored by certain policy makers, while the world reeled from the break-up of the Soviet Union and the emergence of newly independent oil-producing nations in the former Soviet Republics. These events have dramatically altered oil production scenarios and the calculus undertaken by those who look after the security of the nation's energy supplies. This is a story with many diverse threads, though many aspects of the tale have been told elsewhere and in more detail. Still, Yergin weaves together an effective narrative. Now nearly one year old, The Quest received generally good reviews from major outlets, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and indeed much is praiseworthy. The book is readable, and it provides a comprehensive survey of the broad sweep of issues involved in energy commerce and policy. Through it all, Yergin maintains a keen sense for the story-line and a journalist's eye for character-driven events. Yet, this is a frustrating book with respect to its two most important themes: the role of oil in the 21st Century and its analysis of the climate debate. As to oil, The Quest leaves one to accept on faith Yergin's conclusion that oil will remain relatively plentiful for the remainder of the 21st Century. As to the climate change debate, the book suffers from a failure to do more than scratch the surface of the science that is at the core of this critical issue. The book will also frustrate scholars. Its citations are sparse, and while there is a reasonably extensive bibliography, it is not at all clear where a good deal of the information comes from. With respect to oil's future, Yergin sees an endless horizon for the resource. Rejecting what he describes as the commonly-held view that the world will soon see a peak in oil production, followed by a meaningful decline, Yergin instead projects a 20% increase in supply through 2030, followed by a plateau, and a gentle decline thereafter.3 According to Yergin: The peak may be the best known image of future supply. But there is another, more appropriate way to visualize the course of supply: as a plateau. The world has decades of further production growth before flattening out into a plateau-perhaps sometime around midcentury-at which time a more gradual decline will begin.4 He is dismissive of "peak oil" theorists, those who see a near to medium- term peak in oil production and a substantial decline thereafter, and he traces their lineage as far back as an 1885 state geologist in Pennsylvania, who apparently fretted over plentiful oil as a "vanishing phenomenon."5 Yergin goes on to find such irrational fears expressed by as diverse a collection of historical figures as Woodrow Wilson, Third Reich Field Marshal Rommel, and former President Jimmy Carter, and he connects this way of thinking to the Club of Rome, which prophesied natural limits to Western economic growth in its iconic work, "Limits to Growth. …