--- title: 10 Questions for 'The Quest' Author Daniel Yergin | TIME description: Energy expert Daniel Yergin on peak oil, geo-fracking and how to power the U.S. economy canonical: https://time.com/video/OhuvVlAM/ og:title: 10 Questions for 'The Quest' Author Daniel Yergin og:description: Energy expert Daniel Yergin on peak oil, geo-fracking and how to power the U.S. economy og:url: https://time.com/video/OhuvVlAM/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/OhuvVlAM/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 10 Questions for 'The Quest' Author Daniel Yergin twitter:description: Energy expert Daniel Yergin on peak oil, geo-fracking and how to power the U.S. economy twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/OhuvVlAM/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # 10 Questions for 'The Quest' Author Daniel Yergin > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: 10 Questions for 'The Quest' Author Daniel Yergin [Watch (HLS stream): 10 Questions for 'The Quest' Author Daniel Yergin](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/OhuvVlAM.m3u8) (5:37)  _Published 2011-09-22. Energy expert Daniel Yergin on peak oil, geo-fracking and how to power the U.S. economy_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:17 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [10 Questions for Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman](/video/IrRkXE2M/) ### 10 Questions for Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman [10 Questions for Danielle Steel](/video/WpkKkZmR/) ### 10 Questions for Danielle Steel [10 Questions for Daniel Radcliffe](/video/xXhL1zax/) ### 10 Questions for Daniel Radcliffe --- ## Transcript Daniel Yergen is an energy expert, an economics expert and an international relations expert, a pultzer prize winner, the author of many books and today's subject of our ten questions. Welcome Mr. Yergen. Thank you. In your new book the Quest, you don't seem that worried about the world running out of oil. Can you explain why? Because I don't think the world is running out of oil. It turns out that when you apply technology, that resources that were not accessible or were not economic, as time goes on, people crack the code and, and, and add to the supplies. With that said, it's not, we're saying that the resources there, there's still a lot of things to worry about above ground. How are you feeling about the story around nuclear energy. I think Fukushima has definitely changed the nuclear story. Prior to that people were talking about a nuclear renaissance. The Japanese themselves were talking about going to fifty percent of their electricity from nuclear. They're now saying we're going to have a different kind of mix. We're going to look for more renewable, other alternatives. We'll use more gas to generate electricity. What do you see for our cause, down the future? Well, people talk about peak oil, that we're gonna run out of oil. But, actually, I think that in the United States we've run into, what's, we might call peak demand. We've had the high point of oil consumption, and our oil consumption's gonna go down. It's gonna go down because we drive more efficient cars, people are not gonna continue to drive more and more miles. It's gonna go down because of demographics, because the population is aging and they drive less. And also, we had a big surge in the United States of driving as women entered the labor force, now they're [ INAUDIBLE ] same level as men. So, you're not gonna get [ CROSSTALK ] A little higher in some cases. Yeah. Yeah. But, on the other hand , as you point out in your book, all those Indians and Chinese are gonna start driving. China now consumes more energy than the United States. And it's really astonishing to see what's happened in automobiles. In 2000, there were 17 million new cars sold in the United States and just about 2 million in China. Last year, there were 17 million cars sold in China and 11 million in the United States. The government [ SOUND ] gave a 500 million dollar loan guarantee to the company that makes solar panels that went out of business very shortly afterwards. Can we have a manufacturing industry, within the United States, that Can make these things economically. Compared to say, how cheaply they can make them in China. For the solar panel manufacturers, they're competing with Chinese manufacturers who are very driven to drive costs down. The leading solar company a few years ago was in Germany. It really has just been knocked on it's back now by the Chinese who are big beneficiaries of German renewable energy legislation. So but this is part of a larger picture of how we compete and on what basis we compete. There's a lot of promise and controversy around shale gas. What do you think needs to be done so that we can extract the gas in shale and And protect the border. Well, if it's gone from being virtually nothing a decade ago to being 30 % of our natural gas production in this country. It's a major part of our energy mix. It's developed very rapidly. Brings us a lot of energy security. And, were we not doing shale gas, we would be spending tens and tens of billions of dollars to import liquefied natural gas. And by the way, this has also created several hundred thousand jobs at a time when jobs is probably the number one economic issue in the country. But, with that said, you know, it has to be done in an environmentally sound way, and the public has to be convinced of that. Could there be a lot of green jobs, or is that just a? The thing is we have a really big complex energy system that sits underneath our $ 14 trillion economy. It doesn't change overnight, so there are green jobs and people have them, but I don't think they've been as plentiful as had been expected, and it really depends upon the pace at which renewables themselves grow. I come from a country that loves its coal. Loves its coal, and. Has built a super duper cappuccino fueled economy totally pretty much on coal. Is there a danger with building an economy totally on sort of a fuel sort. Yes well, your, Australia also of course now they've built it internally. But Australia's economic growth and the strength of the Australian currency is related to the export of coal and these other raw materials. Uranium. I mean, so much of what's happening in the world economy now is really being set by what's happening in China. 20 million people a year are moving into cities, and these cities are coming from nowhere, and they're the biggest cities. In the world, when you see what's happened with the price of oil. Often now, it will move in terms of what's the latest manufacturing data from China. Do you get really annoyed when you see people doing really energy wasteful things? People say, well we waste energy and obviously we can look around and find it. But what strikes me when you look back at the last 30 years, what's happened is we've become twice as energy efficient. As we were in the 1970s. If you go in the campus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology five or six years ago, there was not an Energy Club. Now there's an Energy Club and it has several thousand students in it so Kind of this I bet that's a party scene. [ LAUGH ] The Energy Club, MIT. They, they, they go. Pushing the ladies away. They go way past 9 o'clock at night. I bet. It's that wild. OK, great. Thank you so much. 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