Life & Wisdom Quote by Daniel Yergin

Yergin’s line is a neat little demolition job on modern prophecy, the kind that arrives wearing a lab coat and leaves with a headline. By stacking failed deadlines - the 1980s, then the 1990s - he turns “expert consensus” into a running gag. The punchline (“still on-line”) isn’t just reassurance; it’s a rebuke. Scarcity narratives keep promising a clean, dramatic ending. The world, inconveniently, keeps muddling through.

The intent is less “oil is infinite” than “predictions are politically useful even when they’re wrong.” Forecasts about depletion often smuggle in a moral: conserve, panic, reorganize the economy, fund a substitute. Yergin’s subtext is that resource limits are not simply geological; they’re mediated by price, technology, and investment. North Sea production didn’t persist because the rock changed its mind. It persisted because high prices justified harder drilling, improved seismic imaging found what earlier surveys missed, and engineering stretched decline curves. Timeframes slip because the target moves.

Context matters: Yergin is an energy historian who has built a career translating the industry’s capacity for reinvention to broader audiences. This quote lives inside a larger argument against linear thinking - that “running out” is rarely a single moment and more often a long negotiation between markets and machines. The irony is that the same dynamism he celebrates can also delay transitions. If the system can keep extracting, it can keep postponing the day it finally chooses not to.