Overview:
Don't be fooled by the latest revelation that an oil-rich country is aggressively pursuing fossil fuel growth, despite climate change. The real lesson comes from the propaganda it, and other such countries, have been using to delay green energy growth for decades.
It’s the sort of story you couldn’t get past a fiction editor as “realistic”, but which is nonetheless par for the course in our relentlessly self-destructive world:
Ahead of COP28, the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference to be held from November 30 to December 12 in the United Arab Emirates, an undercover investigation has confirmed that Saudi Arabia’s government is expressly trying to drive up global demand for fossil fuels, especially in emerging African and Asian markets.
Yes, in a year when global temperatures nudged past 2°C over pre-industrial levels.
Yes, in a year when climate change events have broken heat records and yielded more extreme and far-ranging weather events than ever before.
Yes, in a year when report after report shows that we are failing to meet our Paris Agreement goals by a wide and seemingly insurmountable margin, without drastic and unified commitments to societal transformation going forward.
READ: A grim sort of hope: Notes from the fifth US climate assessment
And possibly the worst part? As much as this investigation by the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR), has yielded damning insider details about how Saudi Arabia is pushing the fossil fuel market forward… it should also come as a shock to no one.
The same day, reports emerged that the UAE, the host of this year’s COP28, plans to use the event to make oil deals of its own. Earlier this summer, international observers noted that COP28 working group correspondence was being sent to a state-backed oil firm.
Even Saudi Arabia’s Arabic-language strategy website discusses an “Oil Demand Sustainability Program” (ODSP): not, as the English-language page reports, a much more innocuous “Oil Sustainability Program”.
So let’s put aside the idea of this being a revelation, and outline the narrative factors we need to keep in mind as we enter COP28 and exit a year of extreme weather events that might also, unfortunately, be the mildest in our lives ahead.
There are many propaganda wars fueling climate change inaction. Here are the key takeaways from Riyadh’s latest exploitation of existing socioeconomic disparities to sustain Saudi economic power today, at cost to a better future for humanity writ large.
Saudi Arabia’s transport-driven oil demand plan
Supersonic planes, super cheap fossil fuel cars, and suped up power ships: these are three prongs of the oil-demand strategy that now shapes Saudi Arabia’s petroleum future. The plan is being pursued by the world’s largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, in conjunction with petrochemicals giant Sabic, a $700 billion public investment fund, and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in part through his supreme committee on hydrocarbon affairs and other kingdom ministries.
Supersonic air travel is a massive gas guzzler: three times more than conventional flights. It’s also still very much in development, which is why Saudi Arabia is working to accelerate related research, according to the CCR report. A key investor in Boom Technology, which is developing such aircraft for 2030, is none other than the NEOM Investment Fund, an organization tied to The Line: a major PR-win of a futuristic urban design that is routinely marketed by Saudi Arabia to boost investment in privatized land projects, at cost to public funding. The market appeal of speedier transit speaks for itself, though, so many are bound to argue that supersonic flights could offer efficiencies elsewhere in the transport economy.
READ: Don’t let the Saudi megacity fool you. We’ve been here before
CCR’s six-month investigation was not able to pinpoint the exact manufacturer partnering with Saudi Arabia to develop a cheap fleet of internal-combustion vehicles for distribution to African and Asian markets, but it did mark the collaboration as key for “an oil uplift for the kingdom”. This backend language is not, of course, how the vehicles will be marketed, or received by those in struggling low-income economies, but it does undermine the publicly stated goals of the kingdom, as an ally of African and Asian economic empowerment.
Likewise, the floating power plants that this Saudi plan proposes, to provide electricity along coastal cities in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, have a PR-friendly motive: access to everyday power for impoverished peoples. Never mind that these ships use heavily polluting petroleum products in close proximity to urban populations (see: Zouk Mikael, Lebanon), and tie their cities into costly contracts that diminish their future capacity to develop alternatives. The target demographics for these plans are usually too desperate to catch up economically to make better choices.
The household oil demand plan
Other facets of the ODSP similarly leverage global poverty to Saudi advantage. The ODSP proposes heavily polluting mini-grids to deliver electricity to landlocked regions of Africa, and plans to control roadways and corner the market on local transportation. As ODSP official Saleh Aldayel unwittingly told undercover reporters, the program involves developing ride hailing companies and taking over bus fleets, to “accelerate and advance the impact and adoption” of vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICE).
Under the ODSP, oil demand will also be protected by continuing to suppress energy alternatives. Saudi Arabia is already involved in overt lobbying against subsidies for electric vehicles, and via disinformation campaigns arguing that electric alternatives aren’t better for the environment. Propaganda hyping the benefit of ICE vehicles with improved efficiencies and “fair regulations” will always muddy the water with respect to local discourse around environmentally sound transportation policies.
One of the sneakiest routes to the suppression of alternative tech, however, might be the superficial embrace of green energy buzzwords for projects that ultimately partner more with oil and gas companies. One ODSP initiative, “Empowering Africa”, claims to be interested in bringing “cleaner energy, connectivity, e-health, and e-education solutions” to hard-hit African regions. It boasts a “Clean Fuel Solutions” approach to current domestic hardships, such as electric cooking stoves to replace wood fires.
But behind the scenes, that “clean fuel” campaign in places like Rwanda and Nigeria is being used to develop a strong regional reliance on hydrocarbon resources. Is oil and gas a step up from coal and wood, for many struggling African households? Yes, but not for long, because the petroleum industry is also severely escalating the frequency and intensity of climate disasters: events that tend to hit the world’s poorest first and hardest.
Even worse, the shift to oil and gas alternatives comes at cost to the secret power that many developing countries do have, precisely because they were left out of the petroleum paradigm for so long:
The ability to leapfrog directly into green tech solutions, if allowed.
Africa rising, in wind and solar
In the course of the CCR’s investigation, reporters met with a Saudi official who claimed that it isn’t possible for Africa to “leapfrog” to cleaner tech. The argument is that all countries need to go through a dirty, destructive oil and gas phase to arrive at the level of economic stability necessary to then invest in alternatives. If developing nations in Africa and Asia are finally going to achieve a proper seat at the global table, this is their ticket in.
That argument does not hold water, of course, because places like Sub-Saharan Africa have a wealth of wind and solar that they could just as easily develop, in place of costly and toxic pipeline initiatives. Both Mohamed Adow of Power Shift Africa and Akinbode Oluwafemi of CAPPA spoke emphatically with CCR reporters, against Saudi propaganda to the contrary.
However, in those same statements against the Saudi claim that Africa has no choice but to go the oil and gas route, these African spokesmen also reinforced why Riyadh’s petroleum propaganda is so effective: at present, alternative initiatives like the Green Climate Fund aren’t working as well or as fast as they need to. As Adow told CCR, leapfrogging can work, “but we need investment from rich countries that claim to be climate leaders. Otherwise we can expect more dodgy deals like this one, which endangers not just Africans but the global effort to ensure a safe and prosperous climate for all.”
And therein lies the side that isn’t properly addressed in this latest “dog bites man” story of Saudi Arabia pursuing more oil wealth: the many years in which Western-guided green energy initiatives have failed to implement wind and solar properly in vulnerable economies. There’s a global power vacuum that is currently making it easy for countries like Saudi Arabia to leverage markets of desperate need, even at cost to all our human futures.
Lighting Africa, for instance, has been a 16-year initiative of the World Bank and International Finance Corporation, to help develop electrical grids powered by renewable resources. But while the program has seen some successes, the pace of electrification has been slower than hoped precisely because the approach taken by these funders has been to build markets, and to support “cross border trade”, rather than directly supply infrastructure for self-sufficiency. While this private-sector model is more robust for international investors, who only want to support initiatives that can promise a good return on investment, in practice this has meant creating new debt cycles for extremely low-income countries, yielding high rates of debt servicing, regional bill-payment failures, and subsequent losses to (or class stratification of) local energy supply.
Just last November, the initiative finally announced a more aggressive upfront investment in renewable energy alternatives in the region, but still through the creation of markets, rather than a direct investment in local infrastructure. This disparity in approach is also why China has recently taken the lead in African development: it shows up and builds roads and related infrastructure directly, without meddling deeply in local governance structures, so that secondary industries can participate in international economic relationships instead.
The shift to oil and gas alternatives comes at cost to the secret power that many developing countries do have, precisely because they were left out of the petroleum paradigm for so long: the ability to leapfrog directly into green tech, if allowed.
Beyond the “dog bites man” story
The danger of supposedly revelatory stories about Saudi Arabia and the UAE pursuing oil industry gains, even as international working groups gather for COP28, is that they can distract us from the broader systemic issues fueling our climate crisis.
READ: So what did COP27 actually accomplish?
Yes, two oil-rich countries, which initially gained outsized international power precisely because of related wealth, are not going to give up that economic advantage easily, even if the world burns all around them.
But the rest of the developed world, by failing time and again to invest effectively in preventative measures, has created the perfect power vacuum for countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE to leverage for their own, self-serving ends.
And the West keeps shooting itself in the foot, too, in the process. Instead of recognizing that mass displacement is rising in strong part because of environmental disaster, either directly or through ethnoreligious wars exacerbated by resource scarcity issues tied to climate change, voter pools are swayed by the end-stage cultural conflicts into nationalist extremes that do nothing to nip the refugee crisis at its source.
Likewise, instead of fulfilling obligations to the Paris Agreement—not only in economic transformation but also in promised investment to global climate mitigation projects—developed nations are exacerbating extreme weather events at cost to their citizens, too.
Climate change does not respect our borders.
It does not respect our petty “culture war” rivalries, either.
If we want countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE to stop exacerbating climate change by stepping up global oil demand, we have a responsibility to cut off their source of political power directly: by investing en masse, and ASAP, in green tech revolutions that will transform our energy markets both at home and abroad.