21
" For a specific date in the first energy transition—coal’s becoming a distinctive industrial fuel, superior to wood—January 1709 could well do. That month, Abraham Darby, an English metalworker and Quaker entrepreneur, working his blast furnace in a village called Coalbrookdale, figured out a way to remove impurities from coal, thus turning it into coke, a higher-carbon version of coal. The coke replaced charcoal, which is partly-burned wood, and had been the standard fuel for smelting. Darby was convinced, he said, “that a more effective means of iron production may be achieved.” He was also ridiculed. “There are many who doubt me foolhardy,” he said. But his method worked.1 Though it took a few decades to spread, Darby’s innovation lowered the cost of smelting iron, making iron much more available for industrial uses, helping to spur the Industrial Revolution. "
― Daniel Yergin , The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
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" President Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would pose a “red line” that would trigger an American military response. In August 2013, word filtered out that Assad’s forces had used poison gas against a rebel suburb of Damascus, killing as many as fourteen hundred people. This was a key moment. The United States was just a few hours away from launching airstrikes. “Our finger was on the trigger,” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later said.13 Obama decided otherwise. He concluded that airpower would be insufficient and ineffective, and he wanted congressional authorization but could not get it. He had come into office to end America’s two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—and he was loath to slip into a third, with no clear path to success. Air power in Libya had helped remove Gadhafi, but it had left chaos behind. Obama was also demonstrating that, as he later said, he had broken with the military response “playbook” of the “foreign policy establishment.” Moreover, he feared that an air strike would not eliminate all the chemical weapons, and Assad could then claim that “he had successfully defied the United States.”14 Still, an American president had said using chemical weapons was a red line, but had not acted on that. Coming on top of Mubarak, it made leaders in other countries question the credibility of the United States and its reliability as an ally. "
― Daniel Yergin , The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
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" in April 2015, when Senator Lisa Murkowski, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, observed that the export ban “equates to a sanctions regime against ourselves.” Why, she asked, was the U.S. government lifting the “sanctions on Iranian oil” as part of the 2015 nuclear deal “while keeping sanctions on American oil”? She was joined by two other senators in arguing that exporting crude oil to “our friends and allies” would bolster both the security of U.S. partners and America’s own international position. The European Union broadcast the same message, declaring that U.S. crude oil exports would, in the aftermath of Russia’s moves on Ukraine in 2014, enhance European energy security.3 "
― Daniel Yergin , The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations