It’s a smile you won’t soon forget, that of Ahmed Yamani – the Saudi oil minister at the time of the Yom Kippur War (1973). Saudi Arabia had just increased its oil prices fivefold to punish the West for its support of Israel. The blackmail succeeded: under pressure from the United States, a ceasefire was established between Israel and its overrun Arab challengers.
A reporter from the BBC then wanted to know from Yamani whether this meant that relations in the world would be different from now on. Already during the question, a triumphant grin appeared on the minister’s face.
“Yes, it will,” he said, looking intently at the interviewer. “And how so?” „A new type of relationship […] And I think you should sit down and talk seriously, with us, about this new era.”
I remembered when French President Macron recently received the Saudi Crown Prince Bin Salman with all due respect, and later again when Commission President von der Leyen traveled to Azerbaijan to be shot with President Aliyev, just like Bin Salman, an autocrat who not too close with human rights.
It depends on how you look: do you see a human rights violator, a murderer if you will, or a benefactor who will ensure that your old mother is not left out in the cold this winter?
Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we conveniently forgot that cheap oil and gas have their price. Somewhat strange: Saudi oil wealth previously led to the spread of Wahhabism, an ultra-Orthodox variant of Islam. Western industrialization has been accompanied by religious puritanism for decades – not to mention global warming.
We should have known better a long time ago.
So it’s an excellent opportunity to become even more sustainable, so now all kinds of sensible people are saying. Instead of exchanging Putin for Bin Salman and Aliyev, we kill two birds with one stone: we no longer sponsor rogue regimes and we accelerate our life-threatening gas and oil addiction.
It’s not that simple, Bruno Maçães told me recently. He is a former Portuguese Secretary of State for European Affairs, consultant and author of Geopolitics for the Endtime. Switching to wind and solar energy is a good goal, but according to him it is ignored that both wind turbines and solar panels contain rare earths or earth metals. You have seventeen of them, and you find them in ores and minerals. But now check the countries where you mine it. oops. And that’s not even counting the cobalt needed for the manufacture of the necessary batteries. “That is why I am in favor of not talking about ‘sustainable energy’ at all,” says Maçães.
Wind and solar energy will also be subject to international competition from countries and organizations that try to secure raw materials. Finding a way out of the climate crisis will also continue to revolve around geopolitics, Maçães believes, in which the EU will have to position itself.
In doing so, he thereby invalidates a second popular wisdom, namely that climate will be something that unites us as humanity, that it is a problem that everyone recognizes as such and that we will jointly support – like the proverbial comet that hits us all. comes off. “Climate change will, in my view, result in unprecedented geopolitical competition.”
That grin of oil minister Yamani, check it out again. I predict that we will see more of this elsewhere in the world in the coming years.
Marijn Kruk is a historian and journalist. He writes a column every other week on politics and the representation of climate time.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 15, 2022