War & Peace Quote by Daniel Yergin

Yergin’s line works like a historian’s raised eyebrow: the past isn’t a museum, it’s a repeating stress test. By stringing together the 1880s, the post-World War shocks, and the 1970s, he’s not just time-traveling for trivia. He’s compressing a century of resource panic into a single pattern: modern economies periodically convince themselves they’ve hit a hard limit, and then technology, new supply, or policy adaptation yanks the boundary outward.

The specific intent is reassurance with teeth. Yergin, famous for narrating energy markets as a mix of geology, geopolitics, and human ingenuity, is pushing back against “we’re running out” rhetoric. The subtext is aimed at both alarmists and complacent elites: fear is historically common, but the real danger is letting fear ossify into bad decisions - premature scarcity politics, overreaction, or the kind of simplistic fatalism that excuses inaction.

Context matters: those touchstones aren’t random. The late 19th century saw industrial acceleration and worries about coal and growth constraints; the postwar era raised questions of reconstruction and strategic resources; the 1970s oil crises turned supply vulnerability into everyday anxiety. Yergin’s punchline - “And we ran out in the 1970s” - is dry irony. Of course we didn’t “run out”; we ran into price shocks, cartel power, and political fragility, then diversified, drilled differently, and redesigned consumption. He’s reminding readers that “running out” often means “the system failed to manage risk,” not that the planet hit empty.