Daniel Yergin: belief

Transcript context

…After World War II, in the big picture you have the dominant allied powers. They're trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the world, and they realize oil is such an important resource. Fast forward 30 years after that, you're in a position where you've lost a ton of leverage against the OPEC countries and you're not in a position to control the supply of oil. How did that happen? The US had been this huge supplier, but after World War II we had economic growth, highway systems, and suburbs. Oil demand is going way up, and we outran production. The US becomes an importer of oil in 1946, ’47, ’48. But it’s modest amounts. Then as we go into the late 60s, you have this global economic boom. Japan is suddenly a vibrant economy. Europe has recovered, a vibrant economy. Oil demand is shooting up really rapidly. The markets that were quite amply supplied become very tight. In the United States, people didn't realize that we were becoming the world's largest importer of oil. They just weren't paying attention to that. It was thought there are only limits to what we can do as a country anyway. When we finally get to the crisis, the famous oil crisis of 1973—which probably opened the modern age of energy—what's going on at the same time? There’s this political crisis in the United States called Watergate. The front page of the newspaper is not about tight oil supplies. It's all about what Richard Nixon did in terms of subverting the election and the political process. There was just inattention and that's one of the risks. I think a lot about energy security as an issue. It tends to fall off the table until it hits you in the face. When did we realize that there was just a ton of oil in the Middle East?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.