Unsheik; the coming obsolescence of oil.

Gregg Easterbrook is a contributing editor of Newsweek, The Atlantic, and The Washington Monthly.

* The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. Daniel Yergin. Simon & Schuster, $27.50.

I've got 20 bucks that says: One hundred years from now, petroleum will be worthless. Historically, many of the commodities that held dominant and seemingly indelible positions in world commerce during one century became afterthoughts to the century that followed. Bronze, salt, tea, dyes, cotton, coal, and rubber are among the items it once seemed humanity could not live without. Why did they fade? When a substance holds great value, there is enormous incentive to discover substitutes or invent alternatives. Petroleum, essential to world economies today, will fall to this progression in its turn, replaced by new fuels such as methane and pure hydrogen, or whole new philosophies toward energy, such as collecting it from sunlight in space. That's why the Saudis are smart to be selling oil as fast as they can pump the stuff, rather than conserving it for their grandchildren. As the sands drift back over the Persian Gulf berms, future desert dwellers may be annoyed that their forefathers didn't sell even more when they had the chance.

But that is the shape of things to come. The shape of things in this, the century of oil, is the subject of Daniel Yergin's excellent book,* the timeliest work of nonfiction in many years. The Prize is a book of great depth, texture, and length, coming in at 781 pages, not counting afterwords and notes. This work should fare well in many award competitions.

Structurally, The Prize reads like the effort of a historian. Although the author is best known as an energy analyst who makes his living selling reports to corporate clients through a consultancy called Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Yergin also has an academic background as a lecturer at Harvard. He first came to the public eye during the gas crisis years as coauthor of Energy Future, a compendium of gloomy projections that has not weathered well; but then practically everybody was snookered by the seventies conventional wisdom that we would soon freeze in the dark. Today, the output of Cambridge Associates deals mainly with routine matters like oil price and shipment trends, the old $64,000 question of whether oil is running out no longer engaging much interest.

Oil uber alles

As a work of history, The Prize is extraordinary and highly admirable. Like most histories, it contains a great deal of material rewritten from volumes appearing before, but Yergin adds fresh details obtained through original research in several archives around the world. He covers the origin of the oil economy and its growth in the Western, Arabian, and Indonesian worlds in rewarding depth.

But The Prize exhibits three failings, all pardonable given its many virtues. First, the great tale of oil is told largely through the eyes of the princes, sheiks, prime ministers, Rockefellers, and generals who wrestled over it at the highest tiers. We rarely hear what oil meant to people: what working at the early fields and refineries was like, what crewing a tanker or doing chemistry at an old Esso refinery was like, what effect this dark commodity and the political struggles regarding its control had on those below the elite level. Focusing on the prince is a common fault of historical accounts, partly because there are more primary source documents concerning the actions and thoughts of the upper classes. But by around page 500, the reconstructed conversations among Great-Men-Astride-the-Landscape-of-Lesser-Mortals began to grow wearisome. I found myself longing for the concerns of real human beings at the level where most of us live.

Second, The Prize suffers from the traditional author's insistence on inflating the significance of the subject matter at hand-a disappointing and unnecessary exercise here, since Yergin's subject needs no introduction.

To Yergin, practically all major political events of the 20th century can be interpreted as a struggle to secure supplies of fossil fuel. Tell that to the Vietcong, the African National Congress, Theodore Herzl, Mahatma Ghandi, the mujahedin, or the Sandanistas, to name a few. Yergin is correct to document how oil shortages handicapped both the German and Japanese militaries in World War II, rendering victory more accessible to the allies than it might otherwise have been. But it seems well off the mark to portray Hitler's war planning as motivated primarily by anxiety about oil. Didn't hatred of Bolsheviks, Poles, and Jews, revenge for the Versailles Treaty, desire for an empire, and madness have something to do with it? And though the pre-Pearl Harbor Western embargo rendered imperial Japan insecure about its oil supplies, the fanatical militarism rising in that country probably would have manifested itself as war even if Tokyo had been sitting on a bigger field than Spindle-top.

In a typical example of overselling, Yergin mentions the famous moment during MacArthur's landing at the Philippines when the main U.S. fleet was drawn off by a feint, and ships under Admiral Takeo Kurita found themselves in position to make quick work of the lightly protected troops going ashore at Leyte Gulf. "But just 40 miles away from the invasion beach," Yergin writes, "Kurita abruptly pulled off and sailed away. After the war, one of the Japanese admirals was asked why. Because,' he replied, of shortage of fuel."' That may well have been the excuse fallen back on after the fact. Most historians have attributed Kurita's retreat to a heroic counter-thrust by a small contingent of U.S. destroyers in the gulf, which charged the oncoming attackers with such total disregard for danger that the Japanese commander assumed they must have been the spearhead of a much larger force that had set a trap for him.

Finally, after asking us to bear with him for 800 pages, Yergin exits stage right from The Prize without suggesting anything about the future of oil or what energy policy ought to be. The book ends with a tacked-on chapter about Kuwait that's already stale, then some very general ruminating regarding the Exxon Valdez and oil mergers.

Yergin has been criticized for sidestepping issues like energy taxes that might upset his consultancy's corporate clients. The criticism is deserved. Putting Yergin on TV as an energy analyst now is a little like rolling out Henry Kissinger for commentary on business opportunities in China, if you'll pardon an analogy between a very congenial and well-liked man and a has-been egomaniac.

Having clients to please clouds judgment. I doubt Yergin altered any of his historical analysis with the corporate subscriber list in mind, because most of his clients will read only the articles about The Prize, not the text itself. But when the time came to assess what all the historical analysis leads up to and provide some conclusions, Yergin took the easy way out.