Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin

There was an oil war within World War II. When Hitler invaded Russia, he was not only going for Moscow, he was also going for the oil fields of Baku. The kamikaze pilots who would fly their planes into the aircraft carrier, one big reason they were doing that was to save fuel so they wouldn't have to fly back. No one would be happier to see a ban on US shale production than Vladimir Putin. I mentioned the word shale and he erupted and kind of said, "It's barbaric, it's terrible," and he got really angry. I don't think he ever imagined that if he cut off the gas to Europe, that Europe could survive. One projection is that 10% of US electricity by 2030 will be going to data centers. A war that began with cavalry ended up with tanks and airplanes and trucks. The allies floated to victory on a sea of oil.

Today, I have the pleasure to chat with Daniel Yergin. He is literally the world's leading authority on energy. His book, The Prize, won the Pulitzer Prize, about the entire history of oil. His most recent book is The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations. Welcome to the podcast, Doctor Yergin.

Glad to be with you.

My first question is, a book like The Prize, it's literally a history of the entire 20th century, right? Because everything i- in the last 150 years involves oil that's happened since then. How does one begin to write a book like that?

I think you begin by, uh, not realizing what you're doing.

(laughs)

I mean, I agreed to do that book and I said I'd do it in two years, it took me seven. And, uh, the stories just became so compelling and it became woven in with the history of the 20th century. And the funny thing was that some years before that, a publisher had flown up from New York to see me when I was teaching at Harvard, and, uh, said she had a very interesting idea for a book. And I said, "What?" And she said, "A history of the 20th century." I said, "That's an interesting idea," and I thought to myself, "It's rather broad," and actually the century wasn't over yet at that point. Uh, but I think... Somehow I think that was kind of in the DNA of the book. And so-

Mm-hmm.

... I, as I told the story, I, it really was looking... It was not the history of the 20th century, but a history of the 20th century.

Mm-hmm. I, I, I found that there's a lot of books which are nominally about one subject, but the author just feels a need to, like... If you, if you really want to understand my topic, you have to understand basically everything else in the world. Um, and I think a couple of biographies especially, if you read, uh, Kiernan's biography of LBJ or Calkins on Stalin, it's just like, it, it is a, a, it is a history of the entire period in their country's history when this is happening. And I wonder if it was for you, you actually did just want to write about oil and, like, you, you just have to write about what hap- what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening in, uh, Asia. Or is it just like, no, you, you set out to write about World War II and World War I and everything?