Quotes from Daniel Yergin

In 1993, China crossed an historic line—one that would shape its perspectives to the present day. It became a net importer of oil.

In 1900, electrics far outnumbered gasoline cars on the streets in New York City. No one was a more powerful advocate of the electric car than the great inventor Thomas Edison, who poured a lot of his own money, along with his reputation and effort, into trying to perfect an electric vehicle.

two things killed that first generation of electric cars. One was Henry Ford's Model T and the mass production of the assembly line. The other, though less well known, was the electric starter, invented by Charles Kettering in 1911 for Cadillac after a person died from cranking a car. Kettering's invention eliminated the need for someone to stand in front and crank. Over the next several years, electric cars faded away.

Yemen may be a prototype for a chaos nation. It has also, because of its strategic location, turned into a critical battleground in the great rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the modern Middle East. "From now on, we can't speak about [the] Syrian army, Hezbollah, Yemeni army, Iraqi army, and Iranian army," Hezbollah television announced. "We must speak about one resistance axis operating in all theaters.

The lithium-ion battery was first invented in an Exxon laboratory in the mid-1970s, during a time when it was thought that the world would run out of oil and Exxon would need to find another way to stay in the mobility business.

The bloom of health, and life, to man will bring; As from her depths the magic liquid flows, To calm our sufferings, and assuage our woes.

January 1861, fell to 50 cents by June and, by the end of 1861, were down

North America's natural gas base, now estimated at 3,000 trillion cubic feet, could provide for current levels of consumption for over a hundred years—plus.

Together, shale oil and shale gas have proven to be the biggest energy innovations so far in the twenty-first century. Wind and solar are both innovations of the 1970s and 1980s, though they came into their own only over the last decade. The United States has surged ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world's number one producer of both oil and gas, and is now one of the world's major exporters of both.

the Bolt rolled into showrooms in December 2016, beating Tesla by seven months with a moderately priced model that could go two hundred miles on a single charge.

By 2023, she pledged, GM would have at least twenty electric models on the market.

While millions of miles have now been driven by test driverless cars, humans drive more than eight billion miles every day in the United States.

In 2015, Herbert Diess was recruited away from BMW to lead the Volkswagen car group with a new agenda. One of his first questions was, What is Volkswagen's electric car strategy? His question went beyond diesel versus gasoline to a challenge that would be closing in on all European automakers.

But shale drilling needed another technology to be economic. This was horizontal drilling. It allowed operators to drill down vertically (today, as much as two miles) to what is called the "kick-off point," where the drill bit turns and moves horizontally through the shale.

By the end of that drilling program, they had the proof. Devon's engineers had successfully yoked together the two technologies—slick water fracturing with horizontal drilling—to liberate natural gas imprisoned in the shale. "The rest was history," Nichols would later say.

The Marcellus shale would turn out to be the second-largest gas province in the world—and possibly the largest.

The year 2008 was the moment when the bell rang. That year, U.S. natural gas output went up instead of down, as had been the general expectation. That abruptly caught the attention of the majors, the big international companies.

new era" for Volkswagen.12 The company announced that it would launch at least seventy-five all-electric vehicles by 2028. "The future belongs to electric drive," said Diess. "Without EVs, we can't win the battle against climate change." He also pledged that the company would become "carbon neutral across the whole supply chain.

Uber drivers, 60 percent of whom have other jobs, have become prime examples for what became known as the "gig economy." Both Uber and Lyft also rolled out modern versions of carpooling services that match up a rider with another rider in close proximity headed to nearby destinations.

It has strong environmental appeal, although in some places it is running on coal-generated electricity. This would make those EVs what some call "EEVs"—"emissions elsewhere vehicles.

Yet at the end of the day, it is still a car, and the experience is largely the same.

The search for "better cab" was not limited to the United States. Cheng Wei, an engineer at the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, missed several flights in China because of his failure to get a taxi in time. Fed up, in 2012 he founded DiDi, which means "beep beep" in Chinese. Now called DiDi Chuxing after a merger, it has become the largest ride-hailing company in the world.

a banker named Jean Liu when she found herself stranded with three unhappy children on a street corner in Beijing, midst a heavy rain, unable to flag down a taxi. Liu had been raised on tech—her father founded Lenovo, which purchased IBM's personal computer business and is now the world's largest PC maker—and she had done postgraduate work in computer science at Harvard.

In 2019, EVs were less than 3 percent of new car sales in the United States. Some 189 zip codes—0.2 percent of the 43,000 in the country—represent 25 percent of EV sales, and all are in California. The main driver is government policy, as it is around the world.