Saudi Arabia Is Trying to Block a Global Deal to End Fossil Fuels | Hacker News Reader

Saudi Arabia Is Trying to Block a Global Deal to End Fossil Fuels

nytimes.com

88 pointsvinni263 comments

Oil-producing kingdoms[a] like Saudi Arabia face an existential risk. If the world transitions away from fossil fuels, and these kingdoms fail to develop technological engines of economic growth in clean energy, electric vehicles, software, AI, robotics, biotech, space exploration, and other new fields, they could become... poor.

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[a] Yes, kingdoms. Yes, in the 21st century. Yes, very different from the West.

Going back to camals, and they are deeply afraid of that.

> The founder of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid, was asked about the future of his country. He replied, "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover…but my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again."

I think at this point there's an element of, "If we don't have the money to wield absolute power, our own people are going to tear us to pieces before they retreat back into the sunset."

If they keep up trying to keep the world on oil, we (collectively the nation states funding or providing military support to these kingdoms) should let their people at them. Some folks only understand that incentive mechanism (believing discussion, collaboration, and diplomacy weakness to be exploited, only responding to force, or the threat of it).

I really do think that's how this all ends, but not until said funding nations have settled alternatives to oil. Pretty much the day after that happens, I think it would be a bad time to stay in the Middle East.

Agree, but I also put forth that with EVs and renewables on a fast takeoff trajectory, that day is rapidly approaching. Were deploying more than 1GW of solar a day at current rates, and approaching 15M/units of EVs sold this year (1/6th of total global light vehicle sales), and these manufacturing and deployment flywheels are still coming up to speed.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/1gw-per-day-futureenergyventu...

Solar is definitely the big success story of my lifetime, one of the areas where the need for more generation, the need to decarbonize, AND the economics actually align.

Additional citations:

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/09/1-8-million-barrels-of-... (“1.8 Million Barrels of Oil a Day Avoided from Electric Vehicles”)

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/09/ev-sales-growing-faster... (“EV sales growing faster than expected”)

https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/2023-COP28-ZEV... (“Zero Emission Vehicles Facebook”)

in that case he wouldn't be riding anything, he'd be dead.

If camels can survive the climate in the desert in the future. Might be walking

They'll get to fly away when their country becomes too hot to survive in. They can still drive luxury cars wherever they flee to.

It is good for the world in three different ways when the world doesn't depend on oil-producing kingdoms: (a) environment (b) economy (c) politics.

which west? kingdom of netherlands? spain? denmark? brit?

In Saudi the monarchs wild real power. In Europe, its window dressing.

Bullshit, this is just the standard lie rolled out to keep people from questioning it.

I’ll bite, what real powers do European kings and queens still have? And do those powers supersede the powers of elected officials?

Whereas, we know Saudi kings can order assassinations on foreign soil and request a live recording of it… and get away with it.

Why all the free material riches and special treatment then?

If they’re effectively useless, why provide such privilege?

Their power is symbolic, but symbolism provides an important service.

Disagree.

This sounds like a school answer. What is symbolic power mean? Like Dry rain

When we figure out what symbolic power mean then we can dig into its importance

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26081208

Not parent, but he probably meant the oligarchy of always-the-same-politicians wield similar power and do as they please, just with extra steps.

Monarchs are pretty irrelevant in Europe afaik.

People don't really have a choice when electing candidates in their country because all parties tend to drift in the same direction (authoritarian, crony capitalism) and they have no clue who their country's representative in the EU is.

In regards to assassinations, I'm not sure about Europe intelligence but I'm sure someone will have something like the CIA in the old continent.

European party coalitions change all the time, what are you even talking about. You can easily go start a new party and get into parliament since many EU countries have proportionate representation.

Vatican City and Lichtenstein monarchs have a decent amount of power still.

There are many more monarchies in the west. Although not all may qualify as "kingdoms" (because the title of the monarch may be something else, like prince or pope)

sweden, Norway and Belgium. Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Andorra, Vatican City.

(Morocco is also technically west although geography is not what people usually mean when they think of west)

They'll probably stop being kingdoms when the fundamentalists that currently pay zero taxes overthrow the likes of MBS and his family once the kingdom can no longer survive off oil. That's why SA is hosting sporting events, raining money onto football stars and building multibillion real estate projects like Neom: they're trying to copy Dubai, bring in tourists and whitewhash their image.

Everyone will become poorer. Not to mention after the severe "population shrink".

Of course, countries don't want to actually do away with fossil fuels. As leadership also depends on them. What they want to do is justify continued antidemocratic power in the name of nebulous concepts that, ideally, are articulated as problems that aren't actually solvable.

Whatever leaders think, many younger people are keen on doing away with fossil fuels.

That's been the case for decades. Those young people eventually became older.

If we stop fossil fuels subsidies, that will be the end of fossil fuels, no need to discuss and plan.

Last year, fuels that drive climate change and pollute the air were underpriced to the tune of $7 trillion. It’s hard to think of a more misguided policy: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climat...

That $7 trillion number is based on a methodology that counts not taxing externalities as a subsidy. I think that’s an economically reasonable way to look at it. But that’s not an appropriate definition in this context. Eliminating express subsidies (to make fuel cheaper) is going to be much easier in terms of “discussing and planning” than adding carbon taxes and the like to address implicit subsidies.

It’s also vastly inflating the external cost of carbon by using unrealistic discount rates and damage functions. The total externality size that DICE models find is something like $1.5 trillion per year, out of a global economy of ~$150 trillion.

The CEO of the UAE state-run oil company was in charge of running COP28. There was a session on making yachts more climate friendly. More oil industry reps attended the climate talks than climate change experts. The industry is not serious about any of this.

Not to mention, said CEO was trying to net a bunch of oil deals with some countries.

I was there at the summit a few days back. The event is an absolute joke, but the Arabian winter is nice.

> The industry is not serious about any of this.

no disagree, they are very serious about controlling the outcomes as any lawyer or executive will do.. I read years ago that the divide is more along the lines of "EU and India support complete replacement of carbon-based energy, while the USA and OPEC+ support transitions (somehow)"

Also note, those parties are not one voice internally.. lots of rancor and argument behind closed doors between factions; lots of agitation among intellectuals and social groups.

Blaming Saudi Arabia in the American news story is an excellent example of high-stakes propaganda. It is the captured policy process in the USA that is the real obstacle. This news item blaming one nationality is classic diversion tactic.

Why should they be serious about a strong-arm power tactic from the declining political class?

> Saudi Arabia isn’t the only country raising concerns about more ambitious global efforts to fight climate change. The United States has sought to inject caveats into the fossil fuel phaseout language. India and China have opposed language that would single out coal, the most polluting of fossil fuels. Iran and Russia have pushed for provisions to protect natural gas.

In other words, climate change is fine so long as it doesn't reduce industry profits

Oil industry profits are the tail, not the dog. In the last decade, the entire global oil industry’s profits were about as much as Apple and Microsoft combined. That’s a lot of money, but not world-moving power. In terms of profit margin, the oil industry is less than half of Big Tech.

The real power is that citizens want cheap energy. Cheap energy drives economic growth. And gas prices are strongly correlated to presidential approval rating: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/upshot/gas-prices-biden-m...

Anyone who doubled the price of gas in America would be thrown out of office in the next election in a landslide.

Well I don't expect the US to abide by a law that says "we will never sell arms to any nation, or profit off war". Why should the Saudi expected to vote against their own cash cow.

Bye plastic, bye modern goods, bye technology, bye datacentres, bye freedom of transport. People really don't understand what they're wishing for.

Plastic doesn't need oil. It doesn't even need fossil fuels.

My university chemistry prof told us in 2013 that the portion of oil used for non-energy applications was only about 10% so if we stopped using oil for energy it would essentially become an ‘unlimited’ resource again.

Meh, not really. Using fossil fuels 10x more slowly just reduces the rate at which temperatures increase, it doesn't eliminate the temperature increase.

"Non energy applications", like using it as the starting material for plastic, is not using it as a fossil fuel, so isn't contributing to the temperature increase.

You think processing of oil (or natural gas) for plastics doesn't involve CO2 emission?

Let me introduce you to ethylene crackers.

Go back upthread clear to mikrl's comment (and I know you saw it, because you replied directly to it).

mikrl said that the amount of oil used in "non energy applications" (plastic feedstock, but also lubrication, and probably other uses) was only 10%, and that if we stopped using oil for energy, then oil would essentially become an unlimited resource - demand would be nowhere near available supply.

You replied that using fossil fuels 10x more slowly would just reduce the rate that the temperature increased. You totally missed mikrl's point - if you had understood it, you would not have replied as though the 10% was being used as a fossil fuel, contributing to global warming.

I pointed out that the use being discussed wasn't as a fossil fuel (and therefore that you were missing the point).

You replied that there is still some use of fossil fuel to make petroleum usable as plastic. Um, I never said there wasn't. And that still isn't the point under discussion.

Using fossil fuels for plastics has to be better environmentally speaking than using them for energy. Simply by virtue of the fact that the carbon is trapped as a constituent of the plastic, not binding off as CO2 and floating away.

That aside though, even if it was ‘just’ a 10x reduction in usage for energy that would still be a huge win because that becomes massively easier to mitigate and offset in effective ways.

Every time you increase or decrease the scale of a problem by an order of magnitude it changes the dynamics of approaching it significantly.

Then what do you use for a feedstock?

Biomass. It's just a small matter of chemistry. Of course this will be more expensive or we'd already be doing it.

It’s not just Saudis even western countries like Norway won’t let go of oil easily. http://www.thelocal.no/20231128/why-norway-is-accused-of-thr...

No one will let go of oil at all. Nor should they.

COP is largely a window-dressing sham

"2nd of October 2018: Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist, was killed by agents of the Saudi government at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey."

this for me was more then enough

don't even want to have a flight stop over anymore.

To me Mohammed bin Salman is just an idiot, used till useful: I don't see any possible solution: maybe future saudi generations: we sure need not to forget government is not the population.

Is it just Saudis? If dependency on oil ends or reduces greatly then what happens to petro dollar? Isn’t it in US’ interest as well? I am genuinely curious. I don’t have in-depth knowledge of this but I was wondering - wouldn’t weakening of petro dollars would further weaken Bretton Woods system? Given that quite some economies are preferring to skip the dollar of late.

Of course, that’s their meal ticket.

I've looked for papers on the geopolitical impact of moving away from oil, and especially how it impacts countries like Saudi Arabia/Russia, but haven't found much.

Has anyone come across content that explores this?

Wouldn't be any different than Cigarette Companies blocking a global deal to end cigarette ban, Or Lobbyist blocking ban on bribing - I mean lobbying politicians....

Their best defense to a large scale move away from fossil fuels is to simply keep production high and prices relatively low.

OPEC should be very careful about exercising their power too aggressively as alternatives are now very competitive even without government subsidies. Consumers have a host of attractive EV options now.

Of course, it is inevitable that we will shift away from fossil fuels but the question is how quickly. It will be interesting to see how these petro nations respond to their ever weakening positions as their power and relevance slowly but steadily reduces to nothing.

Saudi Arabia / OPEC is actively working to keep the prices high. I think that's a clear indication they believe we've reached the point of no return and stopping the energy revolution is no longer possible. Lowering the prices might slow it down a bit, but all-in-all it would not bring long term higher profits.

Not only that but they can't afford it. They need the price to be near $100/barrel to avoid a budget deficit.

Its up for debate as to how attractive EVs are to consumers.

https://archive.vn/2bcFS

Well, this one is interesting. Asia. Africa. Latam. These markets are far away from being done with fossil fuels. When most of the world catches up to the rest of the developed world, then that initiative will succeed.

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