In Daniel Yergin's outlook, climate change acts purely through prices, regulations and subsidies
Penguin; 512 pages; $38. Allen Lane; £25.in 1991 Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power” quickly attained the status of a classic. A massive narrative history, it wove the story of oil through the previous century’s economic, political and military events deftly and exhaustively. It was also well timed. The fall of the Soviet Union, a clear punctuation point, made it a good moment at which to take the measure of one of modern history’s most important threads.
Mr Yergin’s new book is not in the same league; nor does it pretend to be. As the use of the word “map” in the title gives notice, it is a much more schematic undertaking. Less than half the length of “The Prize”, it has a larger number of chapters, each picking off a particular topic.
But it is also rather limited. The mostly geographic structure keeps out some important stories: Australia, which over the past two decades has become the world’s biggest exporter of both coal and liquefied natural gas, turns up almost entirely as “and Australia”, concluding lists of other countries.
It is greater, though, than his interest in climate change per se. Mr Yergin treats this overwhelming geophysical disruption almost entirely in terms of the way it is mediated through politics and policies, European and otherwise. In his outlook it acts purely through prices, regulations and subsidies, not through changed landscapes, displaced populations or rising seas. The idea that, as an externality of fossil-fuel use, it is already and always a part of the economy does not get a look in .
In his essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argued that a world in which the environment as a whole is increasingly a human construction requires a new form of history, transcending the kind in which people and nations play out their dramas in front of immutable scenery. As Mr Chakrabarty’s second thesis has it: “The idea of the Anthropocene...severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity/globalisation”.
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