Time & Perspective Quote by Daniel Yergin

Oil has never been just a commodity; it is a mood swing with a pipeline. Daniel Yergin’s line lands because it demystifies an industry that sells itself as engineering destiny and national security. “Cycles of shortage and surplus” is deliberately unromantic language for something routinely treated as apocalyptic: the lights go out, the pumps run dry, the economy seizes. Yergin’s intent is to puncture that drama by framing volatility as the baseline condition, not an exception caused by one villain, one war, one OPEC meeting.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to certainty. Oil politics is addicted to forecasting - peak oil, energy independence, permanent scarcity, endless abundance - and Yergin is reminding readers that these narratives keep collapsing under their own confidence. Shortage invites panic, policy overreach, and investment booms; surplus breeds complacency, price crashes, and underinvestment. The cycle isn’t merely market behavior, it’s institutional behavior: companies, governments, and consumers all overcorrect, then pay for the last crisis in the next one.

Context matters because Yergin writes as a historian of power, not a trader. His work tracks how oil’s physical realities (decline rates, discovery, infrastructure bottlenecks) collide with geopolitics (wars, embargoes, cartels) and with the psychology of expectations. The sentence also reads like a warning label for the present energy transition: even as demand shifts, the old feedback loop can intensify. Underinvest in supply too quickly and you get scarcity; cling to the old system too long and you get glut. Yergin’s point isn’t that nothing changes - it’s that oil’s most reliable feature is the whiplash.