?The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World,? by Daniel Yergin

Daniel Yergin is the closest thing we have to an energy seer. He runs Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and his contacts in the industry are prodigious. His book ?The Prize? was a No. 1 bestseller and the basis for a PBS series. It was magisterial in its account of the rise of the oil industry, and some of that power carries over into this new book, which includes a remarkable chronicle of the rise of the Russian oil industry and of its fate in the post-Soviet free-for-all. (See, for instance, his account of Sparmurat Niyazov, the former ruler of Turkmenistan, who not only renamed the months of the year after his mother but also managed to sell the same natural gas to several foreign companies.) Yergin also tells the story of the mergers that produced the super-major oil companies and of the political calculations that have left even them small compared to the national oil and gas companies that now dominate supplies.

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Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=28841e9ab4c48859140b70c6d0f212db

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