$170,000 a minute: why Saudi Arabia is the biggest blocker of climate action Desert kingdom depends on oil dollars but its people already face a climate ‘at the verge of livability’. What’s going on? GuardianDamian Carrington  Can you imagine getting another $170,000 one minute later? And the handouts then continuing every minute for years? If so, you have a feel for the colossal cash machine that is Saudi Arabia’s state oil company Aramco, the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas last year...... Saudi Arabia vital statistics GDP per capita per annum: $35,230 (global average $14,210) Total annual tonnes CO2: 736m (seventh highest country) CO2 per capita: 22.13 metric tonnes (global average 4.7) Most recent NDC (carbon plan): 2021 Climate plans: critically insufficientPopulation: 36 million Can you imagine someone giving you $170,000 (£129,000)? What would you buy? Can you imagine getting another $170,000 one minute later? And the handouts then continuing every minute for years? If so, you have a feel for the colossal cash machine that is Saudi Arabia’s state oil company Aramco, the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas last year. How can these contradictions be understood, and can countries desperate to fight a climate crisis that is already killing a person a minute outflank Saudi obstruction? “The Saudis are not crazy.” says Karim Elgendy, an expert on climate and energy in the Middle East. “But they don’t want to be a failed state.”

The point of the spear......Saudi Arabia almost killed the global UN climate treaty at birth three decades ago. Negotiations veteran Alden Meyer was in the room at the UN headquarters in New York as the gavel was about to come down on a treaty. “French diplomat Jean Ripert had to ignore the Saudis, and the Kuwaitis, vigorously waving their nameplates in the back of the room, trying to object to adoption of the treaty. He just ignored them and brought down the gavel.” “But that’s something you can only do if it’s a handful of countries,” he says. Since then, Saudi Arabia has taken care to mobilise the Arab group or other major players, and to great effect. “They’ve been the point of the spear in terms of organising the resistance,” says Meyer, at the climate thinktank E3G. An early and pivotal victory for Saudi Arabia and its oil-rich Opec allies was blocking the use of voting to take decisions in UN climate negotiations – voting is common in other UN bodies. Instead, consensus is needed for approval. “This impasse has never been overcome. It gives outsized influence to laggards, which suits Saudi Arabia very well,” a report by the Climate Social Science Network found, with the impasse since “crippling” the talks.

Armed with an effective veto, Saudi Arabia has held back climate negotiations ever since by becoming master of the arcane and complicated procedural rules that govern the process, “seeking to ensure it achieves as little as possible, as slowly as possible”, the report said. More than a dozen obstruction tactics have been deployed, from disputing the agendas to claiming that strands of the talks have no mandate to discuss issues it dislikes – such as phasing out fossil fuels – to insisting action to help vulnerable countries adapt to global heating is linked to compensating oil-rich nations for lost sales. Delay is a key aim and, for example, Saudi Arabia strongly opposed any virtual negotiations when Covid shut down the world in 2020. “They are really good at it, absolutely masterful,” says Dr Joanna Depledge at the University of Cambridge. Saudi Arabia also deploys broader arguments: that the big historical emitters, such as the US, Russia and UK, bear the main responsibility for tackling climate change under the terms of the treaty, and that while it sells the oil, helping to fund its development, other nations actually burn it. The Saudi government did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.

‘Water down, weaken, remove’.......In recent years, Saudi climate obstruction has expanded from the climate talks to many international environmental meetings. A plan to cap the production of plastic, supported by more than 100 nations, collapsed in August after opposition by Saudi Arabia and allies, which had also blocked voting in those negotiations A landmark deal for a carbon tax on shipping was stymied in October after Saudi Arabia – backing voting on this occasion – called a successful vote for a postponement, amid bullying by the US. Even at a UN desertification summit hosted by Saudi Arabia itself in 2024, nations failed to agree on a response to drought because the hosts refused to allow any mention of climate in the agreement.This full-spectrum assault on climate action was memorably described by Meyer as a “wrecking ball” last year. “They definitely are still in that mode,” he says. Saudi Arabia has also consistently worked to weaken the influential reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are signed off by governments, Meyer says, “systematically trying to water down, weaken and remove” mentions of, for example, “net zero”, despite Riyadh having a 2060 net zero target. One startling fact illustrates the success of Saudi obstructionism. It took 28 years of annual UN Cop negotiations for the first mention of fossil fuels in the decision, at the Cop28 summit in Dubai in 2023, sparking an immediate fightback by the Saudis that left that strand of the talks a “debacle”, according to Depledge. The Saudis claimed the agreed “transition away from fossil fuels” was just one option on an “à la carte menu”.

Monopolising fossil fuels..... It’s hard to grasp the scale of what Saudi Arabia is seeking to protect. Aramco was the world’s biggest oil and gas producer in 2024 and the kingdom has the second biggest proven oil reserves in the world (after Venezuela). Its oil is simple to extract, and its ability to quickly ramp up or cut production gives it the greatest influence over the global oil market, which it uses as part of the Opec+ cartel of oil exporters to manipulate the price of oil. It costs just $2 to get a barrelful of oil out of the ground, Aramco’s chief executive, Amin Nasser, said in October, but that barrel has been selling for between $60 and $80 over the last year. The extraordinary profit margin meant that Aramco banked $250m of profit every day from 2016 to 2023, making it the world’s most profitable company over that period. “Saudi Arabia wants to prevent a strong global response to climate change because they see that as really threatening their economy, for reasons that are pretty damn obvious,” says Depledge. “Saudi Arabia depends on fossil exports for national survival [and] the regime regards the prospect of a green energy transition as an existential threat,” says historian Nils Gilman, writing recently in Foreign Policy. “The House of Saud uses its oil rents to finance both its domestic social order and its international influence.” For example, Saudi Arabia spent more on fossil fuel subsidies, keeping energy cheap for its subjects, than it did on its national health budget in 2023.“Its ambition is not to phase out fossil fuels, but to monopolise them as global supply tightens,” Gilman says, leaving Aramco as the last man standing. In 2024, Aramco had the largest near-term expansion plans for oil and gas production of any company in the world, 60% of which could not be burned in a 1.5C climate scenario. Aramco declined to comment.......read on   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/15/170000-a-minute-why-saudi-arabia-is-the-biggest-blocker-of-climate-action