For years, the oil-rich kingdom has been accused of using its vast resources and savvy negotiating tactics to push against and delay climate progress, but multiple experts say this year it has been bolder than ever.
Saudi Arabia’s interference has been “blatant and in your face,” said Harjeet Singh, a climate advocate and founding director of Satat Sampada Climate Foundation. “They’re just blocking everything.”
Over the past few months, United Nations-backed talks on climate change, the biodiversity crisis, plastic pollution and desertification — the last of which was held in the Saudi capital Riyadh — all collapsed or resulted in agreements criticized as vastly insufficient.
This pattern of failure is not due to Saudi Arabia alone, experts say, but the country has been among those pushing hardest against ambitious action. “They’re the most brazen, the most outspoken,” said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at E3G, a climate think tank.
Saudi Arabia’s increased boldness may be due to a number of factors experts say, including the imminent arrival of climate-denier Donald Trump in the US White House.
But, it could also be a response to a growing global consensus around the need to stop burning fossil fuels. “They’re emboldened because they are now seeing writing on the wall,” Singh said.
A kingdom built on oil
Modern Saudi Arabia was built on fossil fuels. The discovery of oil reserves in the late 1930s took it from a nomadic, desert country to a prosperous kingdom within a handful of decades.
Oil is so fundamental to Saudi Arabia’s identity, it applied for some of its infrastructure including a pipeline and refinery to receive UNESCO World Heritage status.
Today, it boasts the world’s second largest oil reserves. Saudi government revenues depend on fossil fuels to the tune of around 70% — a reliance experts say helps explain its approach to climate action.
The country has “been obstructionist” since the beginning of the UN’s climate process three decades ago, Meyer told CNN. Not only has it consistently cast doubt on and undermined the scientific consensus on climate change — that it is caused by fossil fuel pollution — it also managed to bake in its own influence, he said.
In the 1990s, Saudi Arabia pushed for global climate decisions to be made on a consensus basis, rather than majority vote, meaning a handful of countries could block decisions, Meyer said. “They gamed the system at the very beginning.”
This consensus approach helped create “a world where the rules were set by the big and powerful,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special representative for climate change.
While Monterrey Gómez did not single out any countries, he said the reliance on consensus “has turned into a weapon against the most vulnerable,” used by wealthy nations to block progress.
The system also helps explain why, for nearly three decades, fossil fuels were not explicitly named in global climate agreements.
This changed last year at the COP29 climate summit in Dubai, when nearly 200 countries, Saudi Arabia among them, agreed to an unprecedented call for the world to transition away from fossil fuels.
But almost immediately after the agreement was struck, Saudi Arabia tried to walk it back. Saudi officials were saying “it’s voluntary, nothing to see here, just move along,” Meyer said. “Clearly they are on a warpath to prevent anything from building on that decision.”
At the COP29 talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, last month, Saudi negotiators explicitly rejected any mention of fossil fuels in the final agreement. They got their way: The summit ended with a $300 billion finance deal for developing countries, heavily criticized as insufficient, and no recommitment to move away from oil, coal and gas.
“What we saw in Baku was very brazen,” Meyer said. Saudi Arabia acted like a “climate wrecking ball.”
Saudi Arabia’s Energy Ministry did not respond to CNN’s questions for this story. But speaking with CNN’s Becky Anderson earlier this month, the country’s climate envoy Adel al-Jubeir urged critics to “look at our actions,” referring to domestic initiatives, including recycling and tree planting.
“We have adopted a pragmatic, practical, problem-solving approach — non-emotional, non-political,” he said. “We are not about grandstanding, we are about tackling this challenge.”
But it’s not just the climate negotiations where experts have criticized Saudi’s role.
“What we’re seeing (Saudi Arabia) do in the climate space is entirely mirrored in the plastic space,” said David Azoulay, director of environmental health at the non-profit Center for International Environmental Law, or CIEL.
At the failed global plastic treaty talks in Busan, South Korea, which ended this month, Saudi Arabia was among those rejecting any limits on the production of plastic — almost all of which is made from fossil fuels.
Plastics are increasingly seen as a backup plan as demand for fossil fuel energy slowly recedes, Azoulay added. “We’ve seen the whole fossil fuel industry, not just the Saudis, reorient their businesses towards plastic and petrochemicals in general.”
A global problem
Saudi Arabia is far from alone, said said Nikki Reisch, director of the climate and energy program at CIEL. “It’s all too easy to just say, ‘oh, one single country is holding the world hostage on climate,’” she told CNN, but the picture is more complicated.
For decades, wealthy countries with fossil fuel interests — including the United States —have “hidden behind (Saudi Arabia), really benefiting from the tactics that they’ve masterfully used to dilute and delay progress” on climate and environmental issues, Reisch said.
These other countries may even shoulder more of the moral blame for the slow pace of action, said Singh, the climate advocate. Unlike Saudi Arabia, whose economy hinges on fossil fuels, “it is far easier for those (other) countries to move away from fossil fuel extraction.”
A senior US official said claims the country has hidden behind Saudi actions were “completely inaccurate.” It was “openly at odds with Saudi Arabia” on plans for keeping global warming below internationally agreed limits, the official told CNN, “and clearly disappointed when consensus outcomes fell short.”
Saudi Arabia does have its own plan to reduce planet-warming pollution. It has a strategy to diversify its economy called Vision 2030 and has committed to net-zero emissions by 2060 — although its targets are rated as “critically insufficient” by the research group Climate Action Tracker.
“They know which direction of travel we’re going in,” E3G’s Meyer said, referring to the global ambition to cut the use of coal, gas and oil. “They’re just trying to slow down the rate.”
But for developing countries, still building their own economies in the face of increasingly extreme natural disasters, delaying climate action is akin to a death knell, said Panama’s Monterrey Gómez, who attended COP29 at the same time as deadly floods and landslides hit his home country.
His hope lies in national and local efforts to speed up adaptation and resilience, “because what’s coming our way is so catastrophic,” he said.
Saudi Arabia itself is very vulnerable to the climate crisis. The arid nation is susceptible to both floods and drought as well as searing heat waves. Last summer more than 1,300 people died on the Hajj pilgrimage as temperatures soared to 125 degrees Fahrenheit — and it’s set to only get worse.
“People are pointing at each other, saying your end of the lifeboat is sinking,” Meyer said, “and they don’t accept that we’re all in the same boat and we’re going down together.”
