Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 18:35:49 +0000
From: "M.A.&N.G. Jones" <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Yergin


I have just got hold of Daniel Yergin's new book, 'The Commanding
Heights', which Lou G mentioned earlier.
The book is crap.
I have another Yergin tome, 'Russia 2010', which is his prognostications
about the fate of Russian 'reforms'. That also is a curate's egg. His
pulitzer book, The Prize, is a classic history of oil, much better than
Sampson's 'The Seven Sisters'. It shows you should stick to what you know,
unless you're a polymathic marxist like all of us (Yergin heads up an oil
consultancy).
His new book is sloppy and full of errors (eg on p380 he says Brazil's
economy is 'twice the size of Russia's or India's' but the CIA world book
for isnatnce gives Brazil's GDP as $900 bn, Russia as $780bn and India's as $1.4
trillion; there are errors like that on almost every page).
Weird is that Yergin's paean of praise to liberalisation, markets,
blah-blah, and all the ideo-paraphernalia of hurrah-capitalism, is full of
optimism about the future.

Neither eco-doom nor resource shortages get a look in. For another view 
on that, read Colin Campbell's 'The Coming Oil Crisis'. (There is a chapter at:
http://dieoff.org/page131.htm)

Campbell is a geologist at Petroconsultants, another oil consultancy and
the one used by the US dept of energy when it calculates global reserves.
Campbell says the capitalist locomotive is about to run off a cliff
because oil will decline exponentially within a decade.

I know something about the oil industry, and I know better than to trust
anything ANYONE says from President Bush on down, and that includes even
Colin Campbell, let alone Dan Yergin. As my dad said, measure seven times,
and cut once.

Nevertheless I continue to believe that Campbell is right, for all sorts
of good reasons APART FROM my malicious desire to see capitalism go down
the tubes.

So the question is, why has someone like Yergin, patronised by oil
ministers, presidents and billionaires everywhere, done this 3 wise
monkeys act? He must know the truth.

Perhaps that IS why.

In a sense Yergin's mindless optimism is more chilling than Campbell's
homely, wel-meaning geologist's take on the future of the world (they have
a lot of time to think about that, while they are sitting at the foot of
cliffs a 1000 miles from anywhere, chipping flakes of rock).

Mark




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