Before understanding what needs to change, we need to understand how completely oil built the world we live in. The Prize is the most authoritative account of that construction — a history of oil that is also, inescapably, a history of the modern world.

Yergin traces the story from its beginning: Edwin Drake drilling in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, the rise of Standard Oil and the first great industrial monopoly, the moment military strategists realised that coal-powered navies would lose to oil-powered ones and that access to petroleum had become a matter of national security. From there the connections multiply.

The First World War was partly decided by fuel supply. The Second World War was shaped at every turn by the struggle for oil — Hitler's drive toward the Caucasus, Japan's calculations about Southeast Asian reserves, the Allied bombing campaigns targeting German refineries. The postwar order was built on cheap oil, and when that abundance ended with the 1973 embargo, the economic and political consequences reverberated for decades. Every major geopolitical event of the 20th century, Yergin shows, has an energy dimension that conventional history tends to understate.

What makes The Prize an essential read is precisely this: it makes visible the depth of the infrastructure, the political relationships, the economic dependencies, and the cultural assumptions that fossil fuels have generated over more than a century. The transition away from oil is not simply a technological problem — the technologies exist and are improving rapidly. It is a problem of dismantling and replacing systems that have been accumulating for a hundred and fifty years, that are embedded in the physical layout of cities, in the structure of global trade, in the foreign policy of every major power, and in the daily habits of billions of people. Yergin did not write The Prize as a cautionary tale. He wrote it as an epic.

The book ends in the early 1990s, at a moment when the environmental costs of fossil fuel dependence were acknowledged but not yet central. Yergin noted the growing concerns without treating them as the story's main thread — which, from the vantage point of 1990, was not unreasonable. What happened in the decades since has given those concerns a weight he did not assign them.

His subsequent work — particularly The New Map, published in 2020 — has attracted criticism from those who argue that he is too sympathetic to the industry's own timeline for transition. That criticism deserves to be heard. But so does the counter-argument: that decarbonisation targets set without accounting for geopolitical reality, for the continued dependence of billions on affordable energy, and for the fragility of supply chains that every major crisis rapidly exposes, are their own form of wishful thinking. The world Yergin describes in The Prize — of competing powers, strategic dependencies, and energy as the substrate of everything — has not disappeared. Understanding it remains a precondition of any change.