The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

Much has changed in the global energy sector since the publication of Daniel Yergin's landmark book The Prize (1990), including the American shale revolution (which, almost miraculously, turned the US into the largest oil and gas producer in the world), the development of wind and solar technologies, and the increasing number of government regulations and policies focused on climate change. Yergin's 2020 book The New Map is an attempt to bring his worldview up to date. He does an effective job telling the basic stories of these trends; they may have already been told elsewhere, but Yergin is an engaging writer and he tells his story with a mix of human stories and broader statistics. However, this is a fractured and nebulous new world order, and as a result there is a sense of incompleteness in Yergin's account. Perhaps it needs the benefit of hindsight ten or twenty years from now in order to become clearer.