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Comment by complex_exp | Hacker News Reader

It would be very strange if they didn't try things like these. It's actually a pretty competent government that knows how to look for itself, the very fact that Salafism hasn't yet destroyed them (the Saudi Family) is a massive achievement of its own, not to mention the quite effective OPEC+ cartel.

That being said this will be decided by whichever technology is cheaper (including things like the risk premia of being potentially cut off from supplies), regardless of agitation either way. Unless somehow, magically, we can force everyone to pay up for their share of damage caused by temperature change - which is extremely far away from being realizable. UN Security Council cannot agree on much more obvious things, like deciding in specific cases that bombing civilians is actually illegal.

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I think that the point is that it reveals that Saudi's renewable energy initiatives [1] are just green-washing. The undercover reporting reveals clearly that their singular objective is increasing and prolonging demand for oil and natural gas.

1. https://powersaudiarabia.com.sa/web/index.html

Why can't they earnestly pursue both?

I mean, they might have realized that oil will eventually stop making current levels of profits, and thus they want to diversify.

But that doesn't mean they don't want to postpone this moment as far as possible into the future.

Because "greenwashing" refers to the Saudi's attempts to say that what they're doing is for ecological, climate reasons.

You're right, they are earnestly pursuing both, for exactly the reasons you describe: pure profit.

But Saudi Arabia has implied that they are pursuing green tech for environmental reasons, which is absolutely antithetical to the stance of "let's burn every single drop of oil we can before it stops being profitable."

They might be earnestly pursuing both, but actively worsening the problem undermines their credibility in conversations about solutions.

Because their plan to:

"... lobby against government subsidies for electric vehicles in countries around the world."

invalidates the claims they have made to be earnestly pursuing renewables. Personal transportation is a huge consumer of nonrenewable energy today, and EVs are the shortest path to transitioning personal transportation to renewable energy.

> the very fact that Salafism hasn't yet destroyed them

Why would it? My understanding is that royal family promotes this particular brand of religion because it helps them maintain social control. It also makes it harder to infiltrate their country with external influences.

The royal family is actually liberal compared to the people they rule. Read about the Grand Mosque Seizure [1], wherein Salafist extremists seized Saudi's main religious site and demanded the House of Saud to step down because they were influenced by "Westernization".

After that event, the royal family struck a deal that gave the extremists more influence in exchange for holding onto power...we're talking women banned from television, cinemas shut down, extreme gender segregation, etc. It was that way until MBS, a relatively liberal person, ascended and whisked some power away from the religious police and extremists, with an iron fist, of course.

Despite their vast oil wealth, Saudi really lacks the human capital to keep the gears going without the help of foreign expats. If the oil wells hypothetically dry up tomorrow...the country is in deep trouble.

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure#

And to some quite extreme people any kind of government that is not solely based on religious wisdom expressed via the clergy is an affront to God (to Allah) - an extremely serious crime worthy of uprisings and martyrdom. Doesn't matter if it's a monarchy, a democracy, or a Soviet/Chinese style one-party system. Unless that party was exclusively filled with religious scholars.

(there's an alternative line of thought that says "you gotta follow the leader because a leaderless state is even worse", and that line of thought is generally prevailing in muslim countries; that's how one would justify having some out of the blue family running Saudi Arabia, with its two out of three most important Muslim holy places)

> the very fact that Salafism hasn't yet destroyed them

Because they have a very active police state working to prevent a Grand Mosque Seizure 2.0 or worse.

This is a major reason Saudi troops are in East Yemen and working with the American CJTF-OIR in Syria.

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