The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

by Daniel Yergin

  4 Jimmy Carter, White House Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 28 (“Widely considered”).

  5 Hyman Rickover, No Holds Barred: The Final Congressional Testimony of Admiral Hyman Rickover (Washington, DC: Center for Study of Responsive Law, 1982), p. 78 (“coincidence”).

  6 Interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover, 60 Minutes, CBS, December 1984 (“stay alive”); Francis Duncan, Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), chs. 1–3.

  7 Duncan, Rickover, p. 83 (“foremost engineers”); interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover, 60 Minutes, CBS, December 1984 (“get things done”).

  8 Hyman Rickover, testimony, Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress, January 31, 1982.

  9 Duncan, Rickover, p. 143 (“unknown to industry”).

  10 Interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover, 60 Minutes, CBS, December 1984.

  11 Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best? (New York: Bantam Books, 1976).

  12 Duncan, Rickover, pp. 2, 157–58; Time, January 11, 1954; William Anderson, Nautilus 90 North (New York: World Publishing Corp, 1959), p. 203.

  13 Robert Darst, Smokestack Diplomacy: Cooperation and Conflict in East-West Environmental Politics (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001), pp. 138–39.

  14 Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961, pp. 192–95; Time, November 2, 1953; New York Times Magazine, December 20, 1953; New York Times, September 17, 1954 (“too cheap to meter”).

  15 Duncan, Rickover, p. 2 (“first full-scale”); Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961, p. 421.

  16 Irving C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian, Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 50 (“cheapest of all”).

  17 Bupp and Derian, Light Water, ch. 4, including p. 82 (“traumatic”).

  18 Daniel Yergin,“The Terrifying Prospect: Atomic Bombs Everywhere,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1977, p. 47.

  19 Interview with George Kistiakowsky.

  20 Bupp and Derian, Light Water, p. 122 (“copious amounts”); Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, October 1979.

  21 Report of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island; New York Times, April 2, 1979; Time, April 9, 1979.

  22 Letter from H. G. Rickover to President Jimmy Carter, December 1, 1979, staff officer, office to the senator, Box 158, Folder 12/5/79, Canton Library.

  23 Interview with Jean Blancard; Bupp and Derian, Light Water, pp. 105–11.

  24 Philippe de Ladoucette to author.

  25 Time, May 26, 1986.

  26 Philippe de Ladoucette to author.

  27 Masahisa Naitoh to author.

  Chapter 19: Breaking the Bargain

  1 San Francisco Chronicle, November 5, 1998; Washington Post, November 5, 1998; Sacramento Bee, November 4, 1998.

  2 Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (New York: Touchstone, 2002), ch. 12.

  3 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 684 (“genuine competition”); John Baker, “The Successful Privatization of Britain’s Electricity Industry,” in Leonard S. Hyman, The Privatization of Public Utilities (Vienna, VA: Public Utilities Reports, 1995).

  4 Yergin and Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights, pp. 363–65; interview with Elizabeth Moler.

  5 Lawrence Makovich, Crisis by Design: California’s Electric Power Crunch, CERA, pp. viii, 1, 3, 36–38.

  6 Interview with Mason Willrich; Paul L. Joskow, “California’s Electricity Crisis,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 17, no. 3 (2001), pp. 365–88 (“wholesale market institutions”).

  7 Lawrence Makovich, “Beyond California’s Power Crisis: Impact, Solutions, and Lessons,” CERA, March 2001, pp. vi, 33.

  8 Interview with John Bryson; CERA, “Restructuring by the Pound,” April 25, 1997.

  9 James L. Sweeney, The California Electricity Crisis (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), pp. 120–22.

  10 Interview with John Bryson; Fortune, February 5, 2001 (“madness,” “cannot run a business”).

  11 Sweeney, The California Electricity Crisis, p. 132; Gray Davis, “California: State of the State Address,” January 9, 2001, on Web site of Democratic Leadership Council (“energy nightmare,” “price gouging,” “out-of-state profiteers,” “hostage,” “on sleep mode,” “brink of blackouts”).

  12 James L. Sweeney, “California Electricity Restructuring, the Crisis, and Its Aftermath,” in Electricity Market Reform: An International Perspective, eds. Fereidoon P. Sioshansi and Wolfgang Pfaffenberger (Oxford: Elsevier, 2006), p. 331 (“untested system”); Sweeney, The California Electricity Crisis, p. 203 (“20 minutes,” “plunder”).

  13 Sweeney, The California Electricity Crisis, p. 136 (“more electricity they sold”).

  14 Sweeney, The California Electricity Crisis, pp. 224–26, 280; interviews.

  15 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Report on Plant Outages in the State of California, February 1, 2001 (“did not discover”).

  16 Houston Chronicle, March 22, 2007; Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2002 (for the traders). For the fall of Enron, Kurt Eichenwald, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story (New York: Broadway Books, 2005) and Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (New York: Portfolio, 2004).

  17 James Sweeney, “The California Energy Crisis,” Conference on Ethics and Changing Energy Markets, Notre Dame University, October 28, 2004.

  18 Arnold Schwarzenegger, inauguration speech, Sacamento, CA, November 17, 2003; CNN.com, October 7, 2003 (“slow to act”); New York Times, November 12, 2003 (“bummer”).

  19 Interview with Joseph Kelliher.

  20 Jone-Lin Wang, “The Power Generation Landscape and Recent Developments,” U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Conference on Merchant Generation Assets by Public Utilities, June 10, 2004 (“unintended hybrid”).

  21 California Independent System Operator, “2009 Annual Report,” p. 7.

  Chapter 20: Fuel Choice

  1 International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2010 (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2010), p. 227.

  2 Jone-Lin Wang, “Playing to Strength—Diversifying Electricity,” Wall Street Journal, February 2006.

  3 U.S. Energy Information Administration, “International Energy Statistics,” 2009.

  4 The Sierra Club, “Stopping the Coal Rush” Web page, at http://www.sierraclub.org/environmentallaw/coal/.

  5 Ayaka Jones and Patricia DiOrio, “Staying Power: Can US Coal Plants Dodge Retirement for Another Decade?,” IHS CERA, 2011.

  6 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Future of Coal: Options for a Carbon-Constrained World, 2007, p. x.

  7 MIT, The Future of Coal, pp. ix, 15, 43.

  8 John Deutch, The Crisis in Energy Policy: The Godkin Lecture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), ch. 3; IHS CERA, Fueling North America’s Energy Future: The Unconventional Natural Gas Revolution and the Carbon Agenda, 2010, pp. vii–2.

  9 Interview with Shirley Jackson.

  10 United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Reactor License Renewal,” February 16, 2011, at http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/licensing/renewal.html.

  11 Carol Browner, CNBC interview, February 16, 2010.

  12 Gregory Jaczko, “A View from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” speech, March 1, 2010.

  13 IHS CERA unpublished paper, “Small Nuclear Reactors—The Promise and the Reality.”

  14 Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking (New York: Free Press, 2011), pp. 82–86; Robert G. Joseph, Countering WMD: The Libyan Experience (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, 2009), ch. 1.

  15 William Langewiesche, The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 173.

  16 World Nuclear Association, “Re
actor Database.”

  17 Reuters, December 27, 2009.

  18 Interview.

  19 World Nuclear News, June 10, 2008 (“absolutely wrong”); Reuters, November 10, 2010.

  20 European Nuclear Society, “Nuclear Power Plants, Worldwide,” at http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm.

  21 World Nuclear News, January 8, 2011 (“insufficient”); New York Times, March 21, 2011 (“changed everything”); Reuters, April 15, 2011 (“exit”).

  22 Dallas Morning News, April 19, 2011 (“month after month”).

  23 John Rowe, speech, CERAWeek, March 2011.

  Chapter 21: Glacial Change

  1 John Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), p. 11.

  2 Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps, p. 21 (“sentiment”); A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, Life and Work of John Tyndall (London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 23 (“language”).

  3 Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps, p. 17 (“ancient glaciers”).

  4 Horace Bénédict de Saussure, Voyage dans de Alps (Geneva: Chez Les Principaux Libraires, 1834).

  5 James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 61 (“mathematical theory”).

  6 Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, ed., Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1886), pp. 263–64 (“shroud”); Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 80–102 (“beloved fossil fishes,” “God’s great plough”).

  7 Eve and Creasey, Life and Work of John Tyndall, p. 86 (“gases not natural”); Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, pp. 68–69 (“in my hands”); Mike Hulme, “On the Origin of the ‘Greenhouse Effect’: John Tyndall’s 1859 Interrogation of Nature,” Weather 64, no. 5 (2009), pp. 121–23 (“experimentally based account”).

  8 Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, pp. 58–71 (“tendency to accumulate,” “every variation”); Eve and Creasey, Life and Work of John Tyndall, p. 279 (“my poor darling”).

  9 Svante Arrhenius, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground,” The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, April 1896, pp. 237–76 (“absorption of the atmosphere”); Julia Uppenbrink, “Arrhenius and Global Warming ,” Science 272, no. 5265 (1996), p. 1122.

  10 Spencer Weart, “The Discovery of Global Warming” and “The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect,” The Discovery of Global Warming, at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm (three thousand years); Svante Arrhenius, Worlds in the Making : The Evolution of the Universe, tr. H. Borns (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908), p. 63 (“more abundant crops”).

  11 Gustaf Arrhenius Oral History, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, April 11, 2006.

  12 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 4.

  13 G. S. Callendar, “Can Carbon Dioxide Influence Climate?,” Weather 4 (1949), pp. 310–14 (“chequered history”).

  14 Fleming , Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, p. 115.

  15 Weart, “The Discovery of Global Warming” and “The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect,” (“marketplace of ideas”); Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, p. 113 (“abandoned”).

  Chapter 22: The Age of Discovery

  1 Roger R. Revelle Oral History, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1986; Judith Morgan and Neil Morgan, Roger: A Biography of Roger Revelle (San Diego: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1996), p. 89 (“a lot of imagination”), pp. 44–45.

  2 San Diego Daily, June 27, 1990.

  3 Morgan and Morgan, Roger, p. 19; Gustaf Arrhenius Oral History Project, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, April 11, 2006 (“extreme stretch”); David M. Hart and David G. Victor, “Scientific Elites and the Making of US Policy for Climate Change Research, 1957–74,” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993), p. 648 (“carbon-cycle”).

  4 Nancy Scott Anderson, An Improbable Venture: A History of the University of California, San Diego (La Jolla: University of California San Diego Press, 1993), pp. 32–33 (“unexpected discoveries”); October 10, 1949, Proposed University of California Mid-Pac Expedition, p. 20 (“featureless plain”); Morgan and Morgan, Roger, p. 86 (“best-known”).

  5 Ronald Rainger, “Patronage and Science: Roger Revelle, the U.S. Navy, and Oceanography at the Scripps Institution,” Earth Sciences History 19:1 (2000), pp. 58–89; Arrhenius Oral History (“stratified”).

  6 R. Revelle and H. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades,” Tellus, 9, no. 1, 1957; Spencer Weart, “Roger Revelle’s Discovery,” The Discovery of Global Warming, http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Revelle.htm.

  7 Arrhenius Oral History (“grand experiment”); Hart and Victor, “Scientific Elites,” p. 656 (“curiosity”).

  8 Mark Bowen, Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate Change on the World’s Highest Mountains (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), pp. 110–11.

  9 Sydney Chapman, IGY: Year of Discovery (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 54 (“metal loses its strength”); Time, May 4, 1959.

  10 Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and Statesman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), pp. 13–39; David Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War: 1943–1954 (New York: Random House, 1986), pp. 241–53; Sverre Petterssen, Weathering the Storm: Sverre Petterssen, the D-Day Forecast, and the Rise of Modern Meteorology, ed. James Rodger Fleming (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 2001), chs. 16–19; New York Times, June 6, 1964.

  11 Roger R. Revelle, “Sun, Sea and Air: IGY Studies of the Heat and Water Budget of the Earth,” Geophysics and the IGY, Geophysical Monograph, no. 2. American Geophysical Union, July 1958, pp. 147–53 (“dark age”); Ronald Fraser, Once Around the Sun: The Story of the International Geophysical Year (New York: Macmillan Company, 1958), p. 37 (“man-made”).

  12 Hart and Victor, “Scientific Elites,” p. 651 (“adequately documented”); Arrhenius Oral History (“historic event”).

  13 Charles David Keeling, “Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 23 (1998), pp. 25–82.

  14 Keeling, “Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth,” p. 30.

  15 Revelle Oral History (“never been interested”); Keeling, “Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth,” pp. 78–79 (“keen interest”).

  16 Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 128–29.

  17 Revelle Oral History (“most beautiful”); Arrhenius Oral History (“I’m sorry”).

  18 Keeling, “Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth,” p. 48 (“present trends”); Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, p. 38 (“central icon”).

  19 Alan D. Hecht and Dennis Tirpak, “Framework Agreement on Climate Change: A Scientific and Policy History,” Climactic Change 29 (1995), p. 375.

  20 The White House, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment: Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel, November 1965, pp. 126–27 (“almost certainly”); Hubert Heffner to Dr. Daniel P. Moynihan, January 26, 1970, Moynihan Papers, Nixon Library; Steven R. Weisman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), p. 202 (“get involved”).

  21 Betty Friedan, “The Coming Ice Age,” Harper’s, September 1958; G. J. Kukla and R. K. Matthews, “When Will the Present Interglacial Period End?” Science 178, no. 4057 (1972), pp. 190–91 (“global cooling”); Hecht and Tirpak, “Framework Agreement on Climate Change,” p. 376 (Defense Department climate analysis); S. I. Rasool and S. H. Schneider, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate,” Science 173, no. 3992 (1971), pp. 138–41 (“trigger an ice age”); James Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford Unive
rsity Press, 1998), p. 132 (U.S. National Science Board report); Wallace Broecker, “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” Science 189, no. 4201 (1975), pp. 460–63 (“discount the warming effect”).

  22 Hecht and Tirpak, “Framework Agreement on Climate Change,” p. 377 (“propelling concern”). Thomas Peterson, William Connolley, and John Fleck disagree, strongly arguing that it is a “popular myth” and a “falsehood” to say that “in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting ‘global cooling.’ “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus,” Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, John Fleck, “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 89, Issue 9, pp. 1325–37. They come to their conclusion by surveying “peer-reviewed literature,” including a number of citations of various articles, between 1965 and 1979. In part, they blame “the news media” for the “myth.” Yet, as the reply to Moynihan suggested, there was a clear division among scientists in those years. As the father of climate modeling, Syukuro Manabe said of his early research, “At that time, no one cared about global warming... Some people thought maybe an Ice Age is coming.” However, by the end of the 1970s, the weight had clearly shifted away from cooling, toward warming, except for the “nuclear winter.” In short, there was no obvious “consensus” either way that characterized the entire decade.

  23 Newsweek, April 28, 1975; “What Is Happening to Our Climate,” National Geographic, November 1976, Time magazine, August 19, 1976.

  24 R. P. Turco, O. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan, “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” Science 222, no. 4630 (1983), pp. 1283–92.