Daniel Yergin

Daniel Howard Yergin (born February 6, 1947) is an American author and consultant within the energy and economic sectors.

Yergin is vice chairman of S&P Global.

He was formerly vice chairman of IHS Markit, which merged with S&P in 2022.

Yergin was born on February 6, 1947 in Los Angeles, California.

His father Irving Yergin worked at Warner Brothers and was editor of The Hollywood Reporter and a former journalist in Chicago.

His mother Naomi Yergin was a sculptor and painter.

He attended Beverly Hills High School.

He received his BA from Yale University in 1968, where he wrote for the Yale Daily News and was founder of The New Journal in 1967.

He was also a member of the prank senior society, The Pundits and the literary society, Elizabethan Club.

He received his MA in 1970 and his PhD in international history from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

While at Cambridge, he wrote for various British magazines as well as The Atlantic, where he was a contributing editor, and The New York Times Magazine.

He has honorary doctorates from Dartmouth College, Colorado School of Mines, University of Houston, and the University of Missouri.

Early in his career, Yergin worked as a contributing editor for New York magazine.

In the mid-1970s, while a post-doctoral fellow, he began to take a particular interest in energy in his writing.

Yergin's first book, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (1977), was partly based upon his doctoral dissertation and focused on the origins of the Cold War.

It was named "best book of the year" by the National Historical Society.

Basing the book on four years of research, with Robert B. Stobaugh he co-authored and co-edited Energy Future: The Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School in 1979.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the book "caused a considerable stir with its optimistic view of the possibilities of energy conservation and such alternative sources as solar power."

It proved to be a The New York Times bestseller, ultimately selling 300,000 copies in six languages.

Within its first year of release, Yergin and Stobaugh were called to Washington, D.C. several times to testify before Congressional committees.

He also advised James Schlesinger, the first US energy secretary, around the time of the Iranian revolution.

According to Reuters, "since then he has given advice to every administration."

Through 1980, he was a lecturer at the Harvard Business School and, until 1985, a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School.

He founded Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) with Jamey Rosenfield in 1982 with the purchase of a $2 file cabinet from The Salvation Army.

With Yergin as president, the energy research and consulting firm was created as a "quasi think-tank and source of energy industry analysis."

He has authored or co-authored several books on energy and world economics, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, (1991) The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2011), and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (2020).

Yergin's articles and op-eds on energy, history, and the economy have been published in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Financial Times.

All of Yergin's books have been drafted in long-hand.

Currently a director on entities such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the United States Energy Association, he is also a trustee of the Brookings Institution and a long-term advisor to several U.S. administrations, as well as chairman of the annual CERAWeek energy conference.

Yergin is arguably best known for his fourth book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (1991).

It became a number-one bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1992 and the Eccles Prize for the best book on economics for a general audience, selling around 700,000 copies in 17 languages.

The book was adapted into a PBS/BBC series seen by around 100 million viewers both domestically and internationally, with Yergin as the principal storyteller.

His 2002 book The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, written with Joseph Stanislaw, described in narrative form the struggle over the "frontier" between governments and markets and the rise of globalization.

In the "first major PBS series on business in more than a decade," he led the team that created an Emmy-winning six-hour PBS/BBC television series based on the book, serving as executive producer and co-writer and interviewing individuals such as Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Vicente Fox, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

He founded Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which IHS Markit acquired in 2004.

CERA was acquired by the information company IHS Inc. in 2004, with Yergin becoming an executive of the combined company and remaining chairman of CERA.

His next book was Russia 2010 and What It Means for the World (1993), written with Thane Gustafson, which provided scenarios for the development of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Described as a sequel to his book The Prize, Yergin's The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2011) continued his history of the global oil industry but also addressed energy security, natural gas, electric power, climate change and the search for renewable sources of energy.

Like his previous books, it was drafted in long-hand.

In 2011 it was shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.