Quotes from Daniel Yergin

The coronavirus crisis demonstrated the degree to which digitalization has become a competitor with transportation, using electrons to connect people rather than molecules to move them.

He named his company Cheniere—a Cajun word for the raised ground in a swamp.

The complex systems that produce and deliver energy are among the most critical of all the "critical infrastructures," and that makes their digital controls tempting targets for cyberattacks.

The major market for LNG in Britain and in Europe largely evaporated with the discovery of the huge Groningen natural gas field in the Netherlands and then additional gas in North Africa and in the seabed off the east coast of Britain.

Shortly after Cheniere, Freeport put its application in to the government to transform its import facility into an export facility. But unlike Cheniere, it did not get a quick approval. Nothing seemed to be happening. Someone explained to a frustrated Smith, "In Washington, the first application is an application. The second application is public policy.

No country has benefited more from the growing global LNG business than Qatar. Today it has the highest per capita income in the world, and a sovereign wealth fund of $350 billion—all for a country with about three hundred thousand citizens (and more than two million foreigners who work in Qatar).

Today there is a growing struggle over sovereignty in the South China Sea—over who controls the Spratlys, as well as another island group closer to China and Vietnam called the Paracels, and other tiny "land features" that barely jut out from the waves—and indeed the sea itself.

The Americans even exacted their revenge for Pearl Harbor in April 1943, when cryptanalysts learned that Admiral Yamamoto, who had planned the deadly attack, was due to make a visit to the island of Bougainville, near New Guinea. American fighters, waiting in ambush, came out of the clouds and sent the admiral down in flames to his death in the jungle below.

Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 was not the first such vision in the neighborhood. It had been preceded a decade earlier by another Vision 2030, this by its neighbor Abu Dhabi, which has been a pacesetter in diversifying.

Vision 2030 itself, launched in 2007, which laid out the overall strategy. The message was that the country needed to diversify its revenue base, upgrade skills, create jobs, and increase the participation of women in the economy. The results have come faster than might have been expected. Two decades ago, almost all of GDP was oil-based. Today, about 60 percent of GDP is non-oil-related. Non-oil exports have risen from just 13 percent of total exports in 2010 to 57 percent in 2018.

The gas project was particularly compelling to some policymakers in India, who hoped that a natural gas link would tie India and Pakistan together with common interests that would help to off-set decades of conflict and rivalry. They called it a "peace pipeline." To say the project was "challenging" was an understatement.

Mapmaking was further complicated when in November 1917, Foreign Secretary Balfour sent Baron Lionel Rothschild a public letter declaring that Britain would "favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

two-tiered labor force. For every two Saudis, totaling about twenty million, there is one foreigner, adding up to about ten million, in the country. But the ratios are reversed when it comes to the workforce. About four and a half million Saudis are employed—70 percent by the government. By contrast, there are twice that many foreigners, over eight million, most of them less well paid, working in the private sector.

every system has within it the seeds of its own destruction

The Republic of China, founded in 1912, was supposed to modernize the country and regain sovereignty. But by the beginning of the 1930s, China had degenerated into a fragmented country. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalists and heir to the Republic of China, was fighting both warlords and Communists. In 1931, the Japanese seized control of Manchuria, where a substantial part of China's industry was located, and breached the Great Wall.

DARPA had been established in 1958, in response to the Soviets beating the United States into space with Sputnik, the first satellite. Its mission was to ensure that the United States would from then on be "the initiator and not the victim of strategic technological surprises.

without the naval power to counter the French advance, "the Chinese government," as one historian has written, turned to warriors of another kind—"its mapmakers."6 Various maps were promulgated between 1933 and 1935 that asserted Chinese sovereignty into the South China Sea, reaching almost a thousand miles from the Chinese mainland

DARPA—the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. In Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers riding in tanks and trucks were being maimed and killed by IEDs. In response, the Defense Department was determined to develop vehicles that would not need drivers—what would become known as autonomous vehicles.

the first Grand Challenge, held in 2004, was a flop. The best that any vehicle could manage was just 7.5 miles on the 142-mile course in the rugged desert on the California-Nevada border. Yet this failure was also a success. "The first competition created a community of innovators, engineers, students, programmers, off-road racers, backyard mechanics, inventors, and dreamers," said a DARPA official. "The fresh thinking they brought was the spark.

A singular cartographic combatant led the charge—Bai Meichu, one of China's most influential and respected geographers.

For me, there is no strategy that is divorced from profitability

over the rest of this century—than any other grouping. The G2 comprises just two countries —the United States and China—which together represent about 40 percent of the world's GDP and 50 percent of its military spending. The G2 is not an alliance or a forum for decision-making. Rather, it underlines the importance of the relationship between these two countries—and their new rivalry—and its impact on the entire world.

company after, he finally

When the SARS epidemic had begun in 2002, China accounted for only 4 percent of the world economy, and the impact on the global oil market was negligible. But now China accounted for 16 percent, and the impact was global; for China not only had become the world's second largest oil consumer, but it also had accounted for half the total growth in world oil demand.