THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 15IN THE 1990SDaniel Yergin emerged as one
of the great chroniclers of our day. Both
“The Prize,” his epic history of oil (which
won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in general non-
fiction), and “The Commanding Heights:
The Battle for the World Economy,” written
with Joseph Stanislaw, were turned into
blockbuster television series. “The New
Map” is Yergin’s effort to chart the world of
2020.
The challenge is enormous. Familiar
schemes for understanding international
politics and power are in flux. Even before
Covid, market-driven globalization, under
the sign of Western hegemony, was in
question.
A sense of increasing disorder and mul-
tipolarity pervades “The New Map.” In-
deed, it is implied in the book’s organizing
idea — the map. Maps are ordering de-
vices. But they are also perspectival. There
are as many maps as there are mapmak-
ers. What Yergin offers us is not one map,
but an overview of the many maps con-
tending for influence in the world today.
Yergin’s selection follows the contours of
the fossil fuel economy, as seen from the
point of view of the major oil and gas sup-
pliers. Putin’s Russia has a map on which
the lost boundaries of the Soviet Union are
marked in red. The Chinese assert their
control over Central Asia and the South
China Sea. Saudi Arabia and Iran vie for in-
fluence across the Middle East. The Ka-
zakhs, the Brazilians, the Mexicans all get
a look in. But what about the rest? If ener-
gy is the theme, why does Yergin concen-
trate only on the producers? Oil and gas
are worthless without demand. But the
world’s big consumers — India, Europe
and Japan — barely figure in his book.
No less striking is Yergin’s treatment, or
rather nontreatment, of the United States.
One might expect him to start with the
strategies of the American oil majors. But
Exxon and Chevron play almost no part in
the narrative. Yergin’s main American
subjects are the shale frackers. But they
are small fry. They matter as a herd, not as
individuals. They have changed world
markets by vastly increasing quantity and
flexibility of supply. This encouraged some
American strategists to talk of “energy
dominance.” But if that is a map, it has
turned out to be utterly misleading. Grand
visions for the export of the frackers’ lique-
fied natural gas have run up against the
harsh realities of market competition. No
big producer, not even Russia or Saudi Ara-
bia, any longer controls the market. What
this multiplicity of sources gives Washing-
ton is not dominance but flexibility. That is
only of value if you know how to use it. And
on American strategy Yergin is surpris-
ingly silent.
Perhaps Yergin assumes that we have
that map in our heads. Perhaps he wants to
spare us the embarrassment of reviewing
the shambles of Washington’s grand strat-
egy since the war on terror. Perhaps he
himself is conflicted, torn by America’s
painful polarization. In the era of Trump
there is not one American map. Yergin’s
own position seems uncertain. He seems at
odds with the recent turn against China.
But he does not elaborate an alternative.
On Russia, he merely notes that it has be-
come a hot-button issue.
The result is a history without a center. A
collage in which pigheaded Texan oil men,
aspiring tech whizzes, Saddam Hussein,
Qaddafi — dead in a drain pipe — Xi Jin-
ping and his guy-pal Vladimir Putin, Saudi
dynasts and vast arctic gas plants pass in
review. The chronology is similarly helter-
skelter. One minute we are pitching ideas
to Elon Musk in Silicon Valley, the next we
are back in 1916 peering over the shoulder
of the diplomats who carved up the Otto-
man Empire. At times it feels as if we are
being whirled through a remix of the great-
est hits from “The Prize.”
No less jarring is the alternation ofvoices. Here is Yergin the master storytell-
er transporting us to the Saudi desert in
the late 1930s. And there is Yergin tran-
scribing bullet points on the future of auto-
tech. At times the juxtapositions are so dis-
orienting that they evoke surreal associa-
tions, for instance, between Syrian suicide
bombers and the question of how we might
regulate self-driving vehicles. As for those
vehicles, Yergin asks earnestly, what are
we to do “about insurance? Currently, driv-
ers are insured because they have person-
al liability. But if an accident happens with
a driverless car, will it be a matter of prod-
uct liability?”
The saga of entrepreneurship, great
power politics, the climate crisis, the tech
economy — any one of these could have
provided an organizing frame, but Yergin
never commits. If “The Prize” was an epic,
“The New Map” is a miscellany.PERHAPS THE KEYto the problem is to be
found in Yergin’s other role, not as an au-
thor, but as an energy consultant. In that
capacity Yergin actually inserts himself
into the flow of the narrative, not just as the
omniscient narrator but also as one of the
mapmakers — the co-author of a 2019 re-
port on clean energy and breakthrough
technologies. His thinking about transport
futures, he tells us, is informed by a plan-
ning scenario developed by IHS Markit, a
firm of which he is vice chairman. “The
New Map” might best be thought of as the
narrative elaboration of a scenario plan-
ning exercise, a collection of unusually
well-written backgrounders for manageri-al role-play (if you are Abu Dhabi’s crown
prince, this is what you need to know about
the Houthis).
Maybe it is wrong, therefore, to com-
plain about the lack of narrative coher-
ence. What Yergin is doing is holding up a
mirror in which we see ourselves, the disil-
lusioned survivors of the end-of-history
moment, torn between the pros and cons of
Uber, and vague worries about such prob-
lems as the historic impasse of Shia-Sunni
relations or Putin’s revanchism. Yergin
leaves it up to us to make what we will of
his panorama. He is not going to do that
work for us.
“The timing of what eventuates,” he con-
cludes sagely, will depend upon many
things — talent, financial resources, “com-
mitment, sheer grit and the well of creativ-
ity upon which to draw. These will lead to
the new technologies, disruptive and oth-
erwise, that will shape the new map of en-
ergy and geopolitics.”
Perhaps in the confusion of the current
moment it is vain to expect more from mas-
ter narratives. But Yergin’s indecision has
a price and this is most evident with regard
to his treatment of climate politics. He os-
cillates between insisting on the vital im-
portance of the issue and dismissing envi-
ronmental activism as a pesky nuisance.
Ultimately, he is ambivalent. “The debate
over how rapidly the world can and must
adjust to a changing climate... is unlikely
to be resolved in this decade.” Given the
timeline that we face, this blithe accept-
ance of indecision is a road map for catas-
trophe. 0Fuel to the Fire
How changes in energy are changing everything.
By ADAM TOOZE
THE NEW MAP
Energy,Climate, and the Clash of Nations
By Daniel Yergin
512 pp. Penguin Press. $38.
A drilling rig outside Caldwell, Texas, 2018.PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL CIAGLO/HOUSTON CHRONICLE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSADAM TOOZE,the author of “Crashed: How a
Decade of Financial Crises Changed the
World,” is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom
Davis professor of history at Columbia Uni-
versity.