Daniel Yergin Quotes
It's extraordinary how inventive one can be with ethanol right now.
Yergin, Daniel. "SPIEGEL Interview with Energy Expert Daniel Yergin: 'We Are Living in a New Age of Anxiety'." Interview by SPIEGEL Staff, Der Spiegel, 13 Mar. 2006.
Almost a century later dirty vegetable oils from fast food restaurants were used in Diesel truck and tractor engines very effectively and efficiently.
This quotation has been used to by detractors of the George W. Bush administration to illustrate what they call is the “hypocrisy” and “deception” of the administration. Most scientists, energy experts and independent analysts would totally agree with Secretary Brodman’s quotation. Yet, despite the fact that Brazil has already converted have their automobile fuel in this way, and Bush’s Secretary of Energy advocates it, in six years of the administration’s tenure, nothing significant had been done legislatively or policy wise to make this happen despite the fact that the President controlled both houses of Congress. Critics asserted that Bush has been an “oil man” in private business and that the Bush family had very close personal and business ties to the Saudi Arabian royal family. If the United States shifted to an alcohol auto fuel base, oil assets and stocks would become worth much less. See {624556} for a similar Bodman quotation.
Lott, like many other reasonably intelligent people who understood little about technology, did not realize that all the early efforts with a technology are relatively primitive and even the best ideas have to be engineered to scale and cost efficiency. A decade later, solar energy had become a significant industry in the work and the United States, which had invented many of the early technologies had lost the international lead in Solar Energy to Germany and China. The ultimate value of any technology cannot be judged by the initial technological efforts.
Of great surprise to most people, there were actual working solar powered engines invented in the latter part of the 19th century. In this famous demonstration, Pifre printed with a large rotary printing press 500 copies of a new magazine. The printing press was powered by a 2 horsepower steam engine which in turn was driven by the solar heat from a parabolic “dish” which focused the sun’s rays on a 50 gallon boiler. Despite a cloudy day, the solar engine took only 50 minutes to heat to a boil and then printed all afternoon. Much of the most effective uses of Solar power uses the concentrated heat of the sun to heat water or some other substance like this device. The vast majority of the hot water heaters in Israel function on this principle—no electricity or any other fossil fuel. John Ericsson of America also developed workable solar engines {635005}. Coal was the fuel that powered steam engines and would do so for electrical generators until oil was discovered. The coal, oil and gas was less expensive however but there were areas that did not have fuel and before oil and gas were discovered, these men thought that at some point the coal would run out. The only reason that the solar engines of the time were more costly where fuel was available is that no one realized the huge environmental consequence of the fossil fuels. Today we do realize that but do not charge the oil and gas companies and consumers to cover the costs of fixing what we know about and are able to remedy. Solar powered equipment is not a modern invention however and has been with us for well over a century.
Daniel Howard Yergin is an American author, speaker, energy expert, and economic historian. Yergin is vice chairman of IHS Markit, a research and information company which absorbed his own energy research consultancy Cambridge Energy Research Associates in 2004. He has authored or co-authored several books on energy and world economics, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, (1991) The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2011), and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (2020). Yergin's articles and op-eds on energy, history, and the economy have been published in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times. All of Yergin's books have been drafted in long-hand. Currently a director on entities such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the United States Energy Association, he is also a trustee of the Brookings Institution and a long-term advisor to several U.S. administrations, as well as chairman of the annual CERAWeek energy conference.
