Daniel Yergin is a founding partner of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Prize, which chronicles oil’s rise and impact on the world. He was winding up a postdoctoral fellowship in international affairs at Harvard and was about to publish his first book, Shattered Peace, on the origins of the Cold War, when Robert Stobaugh approached him about joining the Energy Project. As Stobaugh explains, “I knew I could string together sentences, but I recognized Dan Yergin was a writer.”

Yergin was weighing job offers from the State Department, UCLA, and the New York Times but, he says, “I had great respect for Bob and HBS, and I was obsessed with the energy problem and saw this as a unique opportunity. All of us on the team felt a great responsibility to contribute to this important issue and live up to the trust and resources HBS had put in us.

“The publication was like a hurricane,” he continues. “No one thought a book with 72 pages of footnotes could become a bestseller and create such a stir. The Energy Project and the book changed my life. Were it not for Energy Future, I would not have written The Prize, won a Pulitzer, or started CERA.”

Says Yergin, who has a new book on energy and geopolitics forthcoming in 2009, “Energy Future can seem amazingly current. But across the energy spectrum —renewable, efficiency, and conventional energy — there is an emphasis on innovation that we’ve never seen before. And energy has become a truly global issue; in 1979, India and China were not part of the equation, as they most definitely are today. As for the United States, I do believe it will be more energy-secure ten years from now. But that’s only if we stay committed to that goal and maintain consistent policy.”

EP team members (and the chapters they authored or coauthored) were I.C. Bupp (natural gas, nuclear power); Mel Horwitch MBA ’69, DBA ’75(coal); Sergio Koreisha DBA ’80 (energy models); Modesto Maidique PMD 30, 1975 (solar); Frank Schuller MBA ’76, DBA ’82 (natural gas, coal); Robert Stobaugh DBA ’68 (oil, energy wars, models, conclusion); Daniel Yergin (conservation, oil, energy wars, conclusion).

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