Daniel Yergin

At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, 2011

Daniel Howard Yergin (born February 6, 1947) is an American author, speaker, and economic researcher. Yergin is the co-founder and chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy research consultancy. It was acquired by IHS Inc. in 2004.

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 B.A. 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 Ph.D. in International Relations (1974) from Cambridge University where he was a Marshall Scholar. He also holds an honorary doctoral degree (1994) from the University of Houston.

Yergin's first major book, Shattered Peace, was a moderately "revisionist" account of the origins of the Cold War that attributed it chiefly to "tragic misconceptions" on the part of American policymakers who, in the post–World War II years, embraced the "Riga axioms" of George F. Kennan, Loy W. Henderson, Charles E. Bohlen, and Elbridge Durbow rather than the "Yalta axioms" of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Shattered Peace was based on Yergin's Ph.D. dissertation.

Daniel Yergin is best known for The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, a number-one bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1992. The book was adapted into a PBS 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." In September 2011 the Penguin Press published his 804-page The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, which continued his history of the global oil industry but also addressed climate change and the search for renewable sources of energy.

Daniel Yergin also wrote and hosted a PBS production called Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, based upon his book of the same title. This three-part television production was a documentary about the economic history of the 20th century. Yergin interviewed many high profile people including Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Robert Rubin, as well as economists John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, and Jeffrey Sachs. The series presented economic history as a battle between centralized command economies and free market economies.

While Yergin has been cited in the popular press on energy issues, his predictions and claims have been shown to be wrong in numerous instances. Specifically, his predictions on energy prices and oil production have proved to be consistently wrong and his analysis of oil and fossil fuels have omitted or distorted key facts, particularly in regards to peak oil.

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 Dependence Dilemma (Harvard Studies in International Affairs 43): Gasoline Consumption and America's Security. University Press of America, 1980. ISBN 0-87674-047-6. Reprint: Rowman & Littlefield, 1984, ISBN 0-8191-4056-2.
• 1989 Fuels report hearing on the oil price forecast and scenario planning (CEC contract). Cambridge Energy Research Associates, 1989.
• The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Cambridge Energy Research Associates, 1990.
• 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.
• Gasoline and the American People. Cambridge Energy Research Associates, 1991.
• The Euro: Remaking Europe's Future: The New Europe poses enormous challenges — for the welfare state, for companies, and for political leaders. Cambridge Energy Associates, 1998.
• 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 0679759220 }. [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.]
• Global Energy: Challenges and Priorities (Foreign Affairs Editors' Choice). Council on Foreign Relations Press, 2001. ISBN 0-87609-305-5. [With Amory Lovins and Dennis Eklof.]

External links

• Daniel Yergin Official Website
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Daniel Yergin on Charlie Rose
• Daniel Yergin at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Daniel Yergin in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Daniel Yergin at the Notable Names Database

Articles and interviews

• Booknotes interview with Yergin on The Prize, January 27, 1991
• Mr Bush and the Riga axioms, S. Varadarajan, 2005
• Crisis in the Pipeline, Daniel Yergin, The Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2006
• A Price Tag to Growth, LiveMint, February 23, 2007
• Visions of an Age When Oil Isn’t King The New York Times, September 20, 2011