The Prize
Yergin, Daniel
THE PRIZE: THE EPIC QUEST FOR OIL, MONEY AND POWER Daniel Yergin/Simon and Schuster/876 pp. $24.95 Edward Norden Not love but decayed plankton makes the world go round—that's the burden of...
...Who can guarantee that this will have been the last war for "black gold...
...A geopolitical mishap tucked most of the oil under the sands and waters of the Third World...
...Yes, Hitler made a stab for Baku, but possession of the Baku fields wasn't the reason he went to war with Russia...
...Like most Americans today, Yergin doesn't know the difference between "compare to" and "compare with...
...This is a large claim, which Yergin may have felt he had to include in order to justify the book's length...
...Yergin finds petroleum more attractive than not, in any case uncontested so far as a source of power, profit, prosperity, and—indirectly—the pleasures of peaceful civilization...
...dard Oil, Shell, Gulf, Royal Dutch, and so on, but he doesn't stint on the wildcatters and independents, who have always been terrifically colorful and occasionally have changed the face of the industry, if not of history...
...Here's his precis of a chapter on the years between the end of World War II and the Yom Kippur War: Whatever the twists and turns in global politics, whatever the ebb of imperial power and the flow of national pride, one trend in the decades following World War II progressed in a straight and rapidly ascending line—the consumption of oil...
...We meet, among many others, William F. Buckley, Sr., who had his business nationalized (his children would say stolen) by Lazaro Cardenas...
...Yet what of the trouble and pain for birds, fish, and humans bound up in maintaining economies, societies, civilizations on this filthy stuff, hidden away in the earth's most godforsaken corners...
...24.95 Edward Norden Not love but decayed plankton makes the world go round—that's the burden of Daniel Yergin's great slab of a nonfiction bestseller, which he worked on for seven years and had the luck to see published a few weeks before Operation Desert Storm...
...And he continues to give the oil companies, in concert with Washington, a B-plus for riding out the bumps of postcolonialism and managing, most of the time, to supply the First World with enough crude at more or less affordable prices—if bestsellers get to heaven, Scoop Jackson didn't enjoy The Prize...
...Oil stinks, and not only literally...
...Well, if what Yergin means is that petroleum products warm us, cool us, move us, and keep us comfortable while we make wealth and consume it, this is an obvious truth worthy of constant repetition...
...If the prime motive of the early American oilmen was greed, their "merciless methods and unbridled lust" nevertheless "turned an agrarian republic . . . into the world's greatest industrial power," self-evidently a good thing...
...It thus only remains for our politicians, inventors, and investors to make solar energy efficient enough and cheap enough to send bloody King Oil into exile...
...Actually, alternatives have been found that are infinite, clean, and ubiquitous...
...Qaddafi in 1970 which Yergin rightly describes as revolutionary, a deal that set the stage for the emergence of OPEC as a fearsome adversary...
...Yergin, an "energy consultant" who operates out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wrote a book during the Vietnam war placing 51 percent of the blame for the Cold War on American shoulders, read everything before writing The Prize and spoke with everyone alive, excluding only Kissinger, Sheikh Yamani, and Saddam Hussein...
...The amoral deals that American and European companies and governments have struck all along with the locals don't shock Yergin, considering how important oil is, nor is he shocked when treachery and violence are used against those who won't play ball, as in Iran to bring Mossadegh down, or in Kuwait to get Saddam out...
...On the other hand, his sketch of concession agent Calouste Gulbenkian, "Mr...
...The Prize, even if it doesn't live up to its portentous thesis, is nonetheless worth buying and having...
...It should be kept on the shelf next to Anthony Sampson's more stylish The Seven Sisters of a few years back, which chronicled the origins and tallied the fortunes of the majors...
...And he does have some lyric moments...
...Yergin's realism makes explicit that not only the West and Japan, but also the wretched of the earth, could never have afforded to trust Saddam with the mother of all petroleum lodes...
...Some of the stories are stale, some of the grammar faulty, some of the portraits boilerplate—we learn, for example that Churchill, who as First Lord of the Admiralty switched the Royal Navy to oil in 1911, was the "son of the brilliant but erratic Lord Randolph Churchill and his beautiful American wife, Jennie Jerome...
...The Japanese needed Indonesian oil...
...Certainly not Yergin, who writes: As we look forward toward the twenty-first century, it is clear that mastery will certainly come as much from a computer chip as from a barrel of oil...
...Five Percent," is fun...
...His book is accordingly long on anecdotes and cameos, ranging over a huge canvas of places and characters, from Pit-hole concessions in Pennsylvania in the 1860s to T. Boone Pickens...
...He was generous to his loyal subjects, sharing his wealth to, and even beyond, the point of waste...
...In any case, he fails to prove it...
...If it can be said, in the abstract, that the sun energized the planet, it was oil that now powered its human population, both in its familiar forms as fuel and in the proliferation of new petrochemical products...
...n the whole, Yergin's is more a celebratory book than an explanatory one...
...And now, greasy snow in Kashmir, burning wells in Kuwait, and thousands of Iraqis dead, all because Saddam made a wrong move in a region of the planet which, if there were no oil there, CNN would ignore...
...But that wasn't the only reason they bombed Pearl Harbor...
...The whole place smells like a corps of soldiers when they have the diarrhea," Yergin quotes a visitor to Pithole...
...and Armand Hammer, who made a deal with the young Col...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991...
...He means something more than that, though...
...His reign was a time of confidence, of growth, of expansion, of astonishing economic performance...
...Yergin also retells the stories of StanEdward Notrlen is a writer living in Jerusalem...
...He ends his account by repeating his thesis: "Petroleum remains the motive force of industrial society and the lifeblood of the civilization that it helped to create...
...The excrement of the devil," the Venezuelan Perez Alfonzo called it, and as a cofounder of OPEC he was in a position to know...
...His largesse transformed his kingdom, ushering in a new drive-in civilization...
...Yet . . . until some alternative source of energy is found, oil will still have far-reaching effects...
...As the desire for spices and gold underlay the politics of the sixteenth century, so the desire and need for oil, and the fight over the power which possession of oil confers, supposedly explains not only the world politics but the world wars of our own century...
...Simon Schama dubs oil "black gold," in a blurb for his friend Yergin's book, and one is reminded that Breughel pictured gold as a form of useless dung...
...And, as well as admiring the resource and industry he's writing about, Yergin is fair about the motives, interests, rights, and pride of the Latin Americans, Arabs, and Persians who have had the questionable luck of sitting on most of the oil and who have long been wrestling with Europeans and Americans for control of it...
...It was the Age of Hydrocarbon Man...
...There is nuclear power, of course, but it is controversial...
...Oil emerged triumphant, the undisputed King, a monarch garbed in a da77ling array of plastics...
Vol. 24 • July 1991 • No. 7
