Not to be confused with white elephants
References
Worth, R. F. (2021, January 28). The Dark Reality Behind Saudi Arabia’s Utopian Dreams: Screenland. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/magazine/saudi-arabia-neom-the-line.html
blog
COP & the UAE
First published in:
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Rutledge, E. J., & Zabala, A. (2023, November 27). COP28: inside the United Arab Emirates, the oil giant hosting 2023 climate change summit. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/cop28-inside-the-united-arab-emirates-the-oil-giant-hosting-2023-climate-change-summit-217859
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The United Arab Emirates (UAE), the world’s seventh largest oil producer, will host the 28th UN climate change summit (COP28) in Dubai from November 30 to December 12. Presiding over the conference will be the chief executive of the UAE state-owned oil company Adnoc, Sultan al-Jaber.
Given fossil fuels account for nearly 90% of the carbon dioxide emissions driving climate change, many have argued that there is a clear conflict of interest in having oil and gas producers at the helm of climate talks. The UAE is alleged to flare more gas than it reports and plans to increase oil production from 3.7 million barrels a day to 5 million by 2027.
Some contend that the oil and gas industry could throw the brake on greenhouse gas emissions by investing its vast revenues into plugging gas flares and injecting captured carbon underground. But independent assessments maintain that the industry will need to leave at least some of its commercially recoverable reserves permanently underground to limit global warming. No oil-exporting country but Colombia has yet indicated it will do this.
Dubai appears determined to undermine even this small victory. An investigation has released documents showing the UAE hosts planned to advise a Colombian minister that Adnoc “stands ready” to help the South American country develop its oil and gas reserves.
The UK invited ridicule by expanding its North Sea oil fields less than two years after urging the world to raise its climate ambitions as summit host. The UAE seems destined for a similar fate – before its talks have even begun.
Oil consumption & dependence
The UAE’s fast-growing population of 9.9 million (only 1 million are Emirati citizens) has the sixth highest CO₂ emissions per head globally.
Citizens are used to driving gas-guzzling cars with fuel priced well below international market rates and using air conditioning for much of the year thanks to utility subsidies. Visiting tourists and conference-goers have come to expect chilled shopping malls, swimming pools and lush golf greens that depend entirely on energy-hungry desalinated water.
Despite decades of policies aimed at diversifying the country’s economy away from oil, the UAE’s hydrocarbon sector makes up a quarter of GDP, half of the country’s exports and 80% of government revenues. Oil rent helps buy socioeconomic stability, for instance, by providing local people with public-sector sinecures.
This state of affairs is a central tenet of the Arabian Gulf social contract, in which citizens of the six gulf states mostly occupy bureaucratic public sector positions administering an oil-based economy with expatriate labour dominating the non-oil private sector.
Tech-fixes, targets and the future
How does the UAE plan to cut its own emissions? Adnoc and other international oil companies are banking on select technologies (to sceptics, “green cover” for further climate damage) to preserve their core business model: extracting oil.
Adnoc, along with the wider oil and gas industry, has invested in carbon sequestration and making hydrogen fuel from the byproducts of oil extraction. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such measures, even if fully implemented, will only have a small impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
The UAE was the first in the Middle East to ratify the Paris climate agreement and to commit to net zero emissions by 2050. With near limitless sunshine and substantial sovereign wealth, the UAE ranks 18th globally per capita and first among Opec countries for solar power capacity. Solar now meets around 4.5% of the UAE’s electricity demand and projects in the pipeline will see output rise from 23 gigawatts (GW) today to 50GW by 2031.
The Barakah nuclear power plant (the Arab world’s first) started generating electricity in 2020. While only meeting 1% of the country’s electricity demand, when fully operational in 2030, this may rise to 25%.
The oil sector is inherently capital-intensive, not labour-intensive, and so it cannot provide sufficient jobs for Emiratis. The UAE will need to transition to a knowledge-based economy with productive employment in sectors not linked to resource extraction.
In the UAE, sovereign wealth fund Mubadala is tasked with enabling this transition. It has invested in a variety of high-tech sectors, spanning commercial satellites to research and development in renewable energy.
But even if the UAE was to achieve net zero by some measure domestically, continuing to export oil internationally means it will be burned somewhere, and so the climate crisis will continue to grow.
Self-interest
Is disappointment a foregone conclusion in Dubai? Already one of the hottest places in the world, parts of the Middle East may be too hot to live within the next 50 years according to some predictions.
Rising temperatures risk the UAE’s tourism and conference-hosting sectors, which have grown meteorically since the 1990s (third-degree burns and heatstrokes won’t attract international visitors). A show-stopping announcement to further its global leadership ambitions is not out of the question.
At some point, one of the major oil-exporting countries must announce plans to leave some of its commercially recoverable oil permanently untapped. COP28 provides an ideal platform. A participating country may make such a commitment with the caveat that it first needs to build infrastructure powered by renewable energy and overhaul its national oil company’s business model to one that supplies renewable energy, not fossil fuel, globally.
The UAE has the private capital and sovereign wealth required to build a post-oil economy. But will it risk being the first mover?
Sectarian matters
Sunni Islam is the largest branch of Islam and the largest religious denomination in the world. Shia Islam is the second-largest branch of Islam.
References
Axworthy, M. (2017, August 25). Islam’s great schism. New Statesman, 146(5381), 22–27. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/middle-east/2017/08/sunni-vs-shia-roots-islam-s-civil-war
Louër, L. (2014). The State and Sectarian Identities in the Persian Gulf Monarchies: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait in Comparative Perspective. In L. G. Potter (Ed.), Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf (pp. 117–143). Oxford University Press.
Jones, J. (2016). Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t [Book Review] Journal of Islamic studies, 27(2), 242–243. https://doi.org/10.1093/jis/etv108
Matthiesen, T. (2013). Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t. Stanford University Press.
Potter, L. G. (Ed.) (2014). Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf. Oxford University Press.
China & the Arabian Gulf
First published in:
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Rutledge, E. J. (2022, December 22). China’s increasing economic ties with the Gulf states are reducing the west’s sway in the Middle East. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/chinas-increasing-economic-ties-with-the-gulf-states-are-reducing-the-wests-sway-in-the-middle-east-196518
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At the end of November 2022, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that the “golden era” between Great Britain and China was over. China may not have been too bothered by this news however, and has been busy making influential friends elsewhere.
In early December, Chinese president Xi Jinping met with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – a group made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – to discuss trade and investment. Also on the agenda were talks on forging closer political ties and a deeper security relationship.
This summit in Saudi Arabia was the latest step in what our research shows is an increasingly close relationship between China and the Gulf states. Economic ties have been growing consistently for several decades (largely at the expense of trade with the US and the EU) and are specifically suited to their respective needs.
Simply put, China needs oil, while the Gulf needs to import manufactured goods including household items, textiles, electrical products and cars.
China’s pronounced growth in recent decades has been especially significant for the oil rich Gulf state economies. Between 1980 and 2019, their exports to China grew at an annual rate of 17.1%. In 2021, 40% of China’s crude oil imports came from the Gulf – more than any other country or regional group, with 17% from Saudi Arabia alone.
And the oil will likely continue to flow in China’s direction. In 2009, it was predicted that China would require 14 million barrels of oil per day by 2025. In fact, China reached that figure in 2019 and is expected to need at least 17 million barrels per day by 2040. At the same time, the US became a net oil exporter in 2019 and thus achieved a longstanding foreign policy goal: to overcome its dependence on Middle Eastern fossil fuels.
China has benefited from increasing demand for its manufactured products, with exports to the Gulf growing at an annual rate of 11.7% over the last decade. It overtook the US in 2008 and then the EU in 2020 to become the Gulf’s most important source of imports.
These are good customers for China to have. The Gulf economies are expected to grow by around 5.9% in 2022 (compared with a lacklustre 2.5% predicted growth in the US and EU) and offer attractive opportunities for China’s export-orientated economy. It is likely that the fast-tracking of a free trade agreement was high on the summit’s agenda in early December.
Strong ties
The Gulf’s increased reliance on trade with China has been accompanied by a reduction in its appetite to follow the west’s political and cultural lead.
As a group, it was supportive of the west’s military action in Iraq for example, and the broader fight against Islamic State. But more recently, the Gulf notably refused to support the west in condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It also threatened Netflix with legal action for “promoting homosexuality”, while Qatar has been actively banning rainbow flags supporting sexual diversity at the FIFA men’s World Cup.
So Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia was well timed to illustrate a strengthening of this important partnership. And to the extent that anything can be forecast, a deepening of the Gulf-China trade relationship seems likely. On the political front, however, developments are less easy to predict.
China is seeking to safeguard its interests in the Middle East in light of the Belt and Road initiative, its ambitious transcontinental infrastructure and investment project.
But how much further might the Gulf states be prepared to sacrifice their longstanding security pacts with western powers (forged in the aftermath of the second world war) in order to seek new ones with the likes of Beijing? Currently, America has military bases (or stations) in all six Gulf countries, but it is well documented that the GCC is seeking ways to diversify its self-perceived over-reliance on the US as its primary guarantor of security (a sentiment within the bloc that was pronounced while Obama was president, less so with Trump, but on the rise again with Biden).
In the coming period, the GCC will need to decide which socioeconomic path to pursue in the post-oil era where AI-augmented, knowledge-based economies will set the pace. In choosing strategic ties beyond trade alone, the Gulf states must ask whether the creativity and innovative potential of their populations will be best served by allegiances to governments which are authoritarian, or accountable.
Wilfred Thesiger
Wilfred Thesiger was a writer, an amazing photographer and a consummate explorer. His most notable works are Arabian Sands (1959) which documented his journey across the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula and, The Marsh Arabs (1964) which documented his time living in the marshes of Iraq.
As a student, studying Arabic, I read Arabian Sands. I recall being very much taken with it and it bringing about a sense of nostalgia. The work by Thesiger concentrates on his Arabian travels between 1945 and 1950. It charts two crossings of the Empty Quarter undertaken between 1946 and 1948. Thesiger’s first crossing, from Mughshin in Oman to Liwa across the eastern sands, was followed by a crossing of the western sands from Manwakh in Yemen, via Liwa, to Abu Dhabi.
The book largely reflects on the changes and large scale development that took place after the Second World War and the subsequent gradual erosion of traditional Bedouin ways of life that had previously existed unaltered for thousands of years. It captured well the lives of the Bedu (Bedouin) people and other inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula and is now considered a classic in the genre of travel literature. In the 1950s, The Times described Thesiger as “the last of a great line of Arabian explorers.” In an obituary piece for The Guardian, Michael Asher wrote that Thesiger’s description of the traditional life of the Bedu was probably “the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever.”
📗 Profile of: Sir Richard Burton
📗 Profile of: Edward Saïd
Highly cited
Here’s a few of the articles I’ve had published with Middle East Policy:
Wiley Online Library (12 September, 2020). Retrieved, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14754967
Edward Saïd
Edward Saïd’s seminal work, Orientalism, has, according to one academic, “redefined our understanding of colonialism and empire.” In Orienrltalism, Saïd surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, and contends that “orientalism” is a powerful European ideological creation – a way for writers, philosophers and Western political powers (alongside their think tanks) to deal with the ‘otherness’ of eastern culture, customs and beliefs. Drawing on his own experiences as an Arab Palestinian living in the West, Said examines how these ideas can be a reflection of European imperialism and racism. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s romantic and exotic picture of the Orient.
Paraphrasing from the book’s introduction, orientalism is the amplification of difference, the presumption of Western superiority, and, “the application of clichéd analytical models for perceiving the Oriental world,” from the perspectives of Western thinkers and scholars. According to Said, orientalism is the key source of the inaccuracy in cultural representations that form the foundations of Western thought and perception of the Eastern world. The theoretical framework that orientalism covers has three tenets: (1) an academic tradition or field [think: Sir Richard Burton or possibly and less so, Wilfred Thesiger] (2) a worldview, representation, and canon / discourse which bases itself upon an, “ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and the West (3) to be used as a powerful political instrument of Western domination over Eastern countries.
Praise for the Orientalism
“Beautifully patterned and passionately argued.”
— New Statesman
“Very exciting … his case is not merely persuasive, but conclusive.”
— John Leonard, New York Times
See too: (Palestine:) The One-State Solution; an ageless piece by Edward Said on the Palestine question which he penned in 1999.
📗 Profile of: Sir Richard Burton
📗 Profile of: Wilfred Thesiger
The Rentier Mentality
a discourse that’s run its course (?)
Sir Richard Burton
A long time ago I read The Devil That Drives. It is an excellent biography, written by Fawn Brodie and first published in 1967. It covers comprehensively the life of Sir Richard Burton. Brodie creates a brilliantly vivid and captivating portrait of Burton. By way of her prose, he emerges vividly from the richly textured fabric of his time (i.e, the Victorian era and the age of Colonialism and Imperialism). His travels to Mecca and Medina dressed as a Muslim pilgrim, his witnessing of the human sacrifices at Dahomey and his unlikely but loving partnership with his pious Catholic bride are treated both with compassion and scholarly rigor. It is one of very few books that I’ve read again. I see it as something of a companion to Edward W. Saïd’s 1978 Orientalism.
Praise for The Devil That Drives
“A first class biography of an exceptional man … read it.”
— J.H. Plumb, New York Times
“The latest, far the best and surely the final biography of Sir Richard Burton, one of the most bizarre characters whom England has ever produced.”
— Graham Greene, The Observer
Sir Richard Burton, it has been said, was a true man of the Renaissance. He was soldier, explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, poet, translator, and one of the two or three great linguists of his time. He was also an amateur physician, a botanist, a geologist, a swordsman, and a superb raconteur. Burton is also said to have been the first to translate The Arabian Nights.
📗 Profile of: Edward Saïd
📗 Profile of: Wilfred Thesiger