The Quest

July 11, 2011
The romance with fossil fuels that the author chronicled in his 1993 Pulitzer-winning The Prize sours in this absorbing survey of the global energy industry and its environmental discontents. Yergin opens with an entertaining account of the last two decades of the oil-industry soap opera, recounting the chaos in the post-Soviet oil industry, the roller-coaster of oil price bubbles and collapses, and the impact of China's voracious appetite on energy markets. Enlivened with piquant historical background and profiles of major industry figures, Yergin's treatment is a canny analysis of terrain he understands well. (His debunking of peak oil anxieties is especially trenchant.) The book's second half examines the rise of global warming politics and the energy sources proposed as alternatives to carbon. Yergin's coverage is evenhanded, encyclopedic, and readable, but his mastery of these complex issues is less confident; his tour of renewables, from wind to cellulosic ethanol and algae, lacks depth and sometimes repeats boosterish claims, while his chapter on energy efficiency focuses more on green gadgetry than on lifestyle patterns. Yergin's perceptive, entertaining guide to the muddled quest for secure and sustainable energy lacks a systematic vision of how we mightâor might notâget it. Photos.

August 15, 2011

CNBC global energy expert and Pulitzer winner Yergin (The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World, 1998, etc.) returns with an appropriately massive tome on an endlessly important subject: the world's energy future.

"The world's appetite for energy in the years ahead will grow enormously," writes the author in the opening pages. Just how enormously remains to be seen; as he writes, energy consumption grew by nearly half across the world in the last 20 years, a result of increasing economic development, and it is likely to increase by nearly as much. But how to feed that increasing demand? In a timely discussion, Yergin examines the aftermath of the recent earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, where damage to nuclear power plants caused Germany and other European powers to declare a moratorium on new plants within their borders. Even France, the world's largest exporter of electricity, much generated by nuclear power, has voiced misgivings about the energy source. In a fluent narrative, Yergin looks closely at three big issues: whether the energy will in fact be there to meet the demand, what sorts of conflicts will be generated with the generation of power and whether energy needs and environmental concerns can ever be balanced. Importantly, he argues for diversity in energy, particularly because of the well-known law of long lead times in making changes to the energy mix—in other words, it takes much time and much planning to convert from one source to another, and the world will need to employ every source it can get. For that reason, the author projects continued reliance on fossil fuels over renewables. At the same time, he emphasizes an indirect source of energy, namely the more efficient use of the energy we already have, for which there must be greater economic incentives.

Capably ranging from science to history to politics, Yergin serves up a highly readable, sometimes sobering view of what the near future will look like—and it may not be pretty.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2011

Twenty years after Yergin made news--and best sellers lists--with The Prize, he returns to reexamine the energy crisis. With corporate mergers and the scramble to control the resources of the former Soviet Union, oil is a bigger headache than ever, while nuclear, coal, and natural gas pose problems of their own. Then there's wind and solar energy. Given Yergin's fluency with energy issues, their vast importance, and the success of the last book, consider multiples. With a national tour.

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