yergin

DANIEL YERGIN: Bolivia may be a *all country, but it had a very big impact in terms of kick-starting reform throughout Latin America.

DANIEL YERGIN: Lenin knew that he needed a different kind of policy. and he instituted what would become known as the New Economic Policy.

Energy expert Daniel Yergin reckons coal will remain the top fuel for power plants globally for the next two decades.

Mr. Yergin devotes a large chunk of his book to renewable sources of energy: wind, direct sunlight, biofuels and hydropower, among others.

DANIEL YERGIN: It was only when Hayek was a very old man that his ideas began to prevail and the world began to change.

DANIEL YERGIN: He started to allow a certain amount of private enterprise, but it was really a very uneven process.

DANIEL YERGIN: If LTCM went down, it would be just the gears, the machine just stopping, the economy not working.

Yergin says, "They're going to be sorry they've made the system so closed. "

"Sometime around 2020, " Mr. Yergin suggests, China "could pull ahead of the United States as the world's largest oil consumer. "

Yergin recounts the making of the scientific consensus that has developed around global warming.

DANIEL YERGIN: Russia has changed a lot since the loans-for-shares deal of the mid-90s.

The best translation of "mottainai, " Mr. Yergin writes, is "too precious to waste. "

DANIEL YERGIN: This declaration by Nixon horrified his conservative supporters.

"Even when they do perform a download, it's usually not that useful, " says April Yergin, a Houston-based accident-reconstruction expert.

Mr. Yergin brooks no cant about climate-change denial, and lingers on the topic of cleaner future fuels.

Among Mr. Yergin's fears is Iran possessing an atomic bomb and upsetting the balance of power in the Middle East.

DANIEL YERGIN: The problems are still there -- the problems of inadequate health care all the way to corruption.

As Yergin's book makes plain, that is simply not true.