106
" the Syrian delegation to the United Nations ended up, in 1948, in the tiny town of Benton in southern Illinois. They were there to seek out a certain James Menhall, who had emigrated decades earlier from Syria to the United States. Menhall had come up with several patents for portable drilling rigs, and had developed some producing oil wells in the small oil fields of Illinois and Kentucky. He was their man. But because of political instability in Syria, he was not able to start drilling for another eight years, not until the spring of 1956. Within half a year, he had discovered commercial oil. Unfortunately, shortly after Syria merged with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic under Nasser, Menhall’s concession was canceled, with no compensation. "
― Daniel Yergin , The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
107
" the first Grand Challenge, held in 2004, was a flop. The best that any vehicle could manage was just 7.5 miles on the 142-mile course in the rugged desert on the California-Nevada border. Yet this failure was also a success. “The first competition created a community of innovators, engineers, students, programmers, off-road racers, backyard mechanics, inventors, and dreamers,” said a DARPA official. “The fresh thinking they brought was the spark. "
― Daniel Yergin , The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
111
" In 1936, he drew a map for his New China Construction Atlas. It included a U-shaped line—some would call it a “cow tongue”—that snaked down the coastlines along the South China Sea almost to the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. Everything within that line, he asserted, belonged to China. As he put it in an annotation, the South China Sea was “the living place of Chinese fishermen. The sovereignty, of course, belonged to China.”7 Almost nine decades later, Bai Meichu’s map is at the heart of today’s struggle over the South China Sea. "
― Daniel Yergin , The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
120
" About half of the world’s oil tanker shipments pass through the South China Sea, not only to China, but also to Japan and South Korea. For Japan and South Korea, the possible risk of disruption would come from actions by China. For China, however, there is only one “certain power”—the United States and, in particular, the U.S. Navy. "
― Daniel Yergin , The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations