Daniel Yergin

Early life and education

Born in Los Angeles, California, to a Chicago Tribune reporter father and a mother who was a sculptor and painter, Yergin attended Beverly Hills High School. He received his BA from Yale University in 1968, where he served on the board of the Yale Daily News, and was a founder of The New Journal. He earned his PhD in International Relations (1974) from Cambridge University where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has honorary doctorates from Colorado School of Mines, University of Houston, and the University of Missouri.

Career

From 1978 through 1980, he was a lecturer at the Harvard Business School and, until 1985, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He founded Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) in 1982 with the purchase of a $7 file cabinet from The Salvation Army. In 2004, CERA was acquired by the information company IHS Inc., of which he is now vice chairman.

In December 2016, Yergin joined a business forum assembled by then president-elect Donald Trump to provide strategic and policy advice on economic issues.

Books

Yergin's first book, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (1977), partly based upon his PhD dissertation, focused on the origins of the Cold War. It was named "best book of the year" by the National Historical Society.

He co-authored and co-edited with Robert B. Stobaugh, Energy Future: The Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School (1979), which was a New York Times bestseller.

Yergin is best known for The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (1991), a number-one bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1992 and the Eccles Prize for the best book on economics for a general audience. The book was adapted into a PBS/BBC mini-series seen by more than 20 million viewers. Yergin was awarded the 1997 United States Energy Award for "lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding.”

His next book was Russia 2010 and What It Means for the World (1993), written with Thane Gustafson, which provided scenarios for the development of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was followed by The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (2002), written with Joseph Stanislaw, which started out as a 60,000-word essay and described in narrative form the struggle over the "frontier" between governments and markets and the rise of globalization. It was made into a prize-winning six-hour PBS/BBC television series. Yergin was executive producer and host of the series. Yergin interviewed many high-profile people including Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Gordon Brown, Newt Gingrich, and Robert Rubin, as well as prominent economists.

Yergin's The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2011) continued his history of the global oil industry but also addressed energy security, natural gas, electric power, climate change and the search for renewable sources of energy.

All of Yergin's books were drafted in long-hand.

Awards

In 2014, the Prime Minister of India presented Dr. Yergin with “Lifetime Achievement Award” and the U.S. Department of Energy awarded him the first “James Schlesinger Medal for Energy Security.” In 2015, the University of Pennsylvania presented him with the first Carnot Prize for “distinguished contributions to energy policy.”

Peak oil controversy

Yergin has criticized predictions of imminent peak oil, noting in 2011 that the early 21st century is the fifth period of widespread predictions that world oil production was about to fall. The four previous times when experts commonly predicted that oil production would soon decrease were: first in the 1880s, then after each of the World Wars, and again in the 1970s. He wrote that Hubbert peak theory ignores the effects of economics and technological advances. Instead of a peak, Yergin predicts future oil production will be more of a plateau, as increasing prices moderate demand and stimulate production. He also addressed peak oil in a chapter in The Quest entitled “Is the World Running Out of Oil?”

Yergin's skepticism toward peak oil has in turn been criticized by the theory's defenders. For example, Jean Laherrère contended in 2011 that Yergin's predictions on energy production and prices omitted key facts, leading Yergin to draw incorrect conclusions. Another industry observer criticized Yergin's statement in September 2007 that the price of crude oil was then higher than justified by fundamentals. At the time of Yergin's statement, the price of West Texas Intermediate oil was US$79 per barrel. The price peaked nine months later at US$145 per barrel before dropping dramatically to US$30 in the 2008 financial crisis and fluctuating widely in subsequent years.

Books by Daniel Yergin

Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Reprints: Penguin, 1978, 1980, ISBN 0-395-27267-X; Penguin, rev. & updated, 1990, ISBN 0-14-012177-3.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. ISBN 0-671-50248-4. Reprint: Simon & Schuster, 1992, ISBN 0-671-79932-0.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. Penguin Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-59420-283-4.

Books co-authored by Daniel Yergin

Energy Future: The Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School. New York: Random House, 1979. ISBN 0-394-50163-2. Reprints: Ballantine Books, ISBN 0-394-29349-5; Knopf, 3rd ed., 1982, ISBN 0-394-71063-0; Random House, new revised 3rd ed., 1990. [With Robert B. Stobaugh.]

Global Insecurity: A Strategy for Energy and Economic Renewal. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. ISBN 0-395-30517-9. Reprint: Viking Penguin Books, 1983, ISBN 0-14-006752-3. [With Martin Hillenbrand.]

Russia 2010: And What It Means for the World. New York: Random House, 1993. ISBN 0-679-42995-6. Reprint: Vintage, 1995, ISBN 0-679-75922-0. [With Thane Gustafson.]

The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. Revised, retitled, and updated ed. New York: Free Press, 2002. ISBN 0-684-83569-X. (Original edition, entitled: The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World: New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998; ISBN 0-684-82975-4.) [With Joseph A. Stanislaw.]