Saudis Want Aid if World Kicks the Oil Habit

You cannot make this stuff up. The Saudis are lobbying for foreign aid in anticipation of declining oil revenues. Hat tip reader Michael:

Saudi Arabia has led a quiet campaign….demanding behind closed doors that oil-producing nations get special financial assistance if a new climate pact calls for substantial reductions in the use of fossil fuels.

That campaign comes despite an International Energy Agency report released this week showing that OPEC revenues would still increase $23 trillion between 2008 and 2030 — a fourfold increase compared to the period from 1985 to 2007 — if countries agree to significantly slash emissions and thereby cut their use of oil…..

The head of the Saudi delegation Mohammad S. Al Sabban dismissed the IEA figures as “biased” and said OPEC’s own calculations showed that Saudi Arabia would lose $19 billion a year starting in 2012 under a new climate pact….

Al Sabban accused Western nations of pursuing an agenda against oil producers, under the guise of protecting the planet.

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19 comments

  1. L233

    Maybe if they had invested their Petro Dollars into education, infrastructure and productive industries instead of building palaces and buying gem-encrusted Mercedes cars for their corrupt royal elites they wouldn’t need hand-outs in the future.

  2. CB

    Yves,

    something random.. months ago you made reference to an Argentinean Survivalists’ blog. He turned a lot of that text into a self-published book (“Surviving The Economic Collapse”), that yesterday hit #153 on Amazon’s “Bestsellers in Books.” References on instapundit.com and a review on that blogger’s wife’s blog is likely what shot it up.

    ferfal.blogspot.com/

  3. kevinearick

    it’s basic economics/physics, not an agenda.

    the jig is up, the Titanic is sinking, and everyone
    is asserting that they need yet another subsidy to
    correct for the misapplication of the last subsidy.

    to be fair:

    The other day I said we could roll out the new
    economy just as soon as we had full disclosure.
    Obviously, if it were easy, it would already be done.

    The programmers were told to slice, dice, and
    distribute traunched securities to the four winds, with
    no code to recapture the pieces, no warning flags, and
    no documentation, as part of the put-a-gun-to-their-head,
    global, too-big-to-fail strategy, in which all the Nation /
    State players were willing participants. Then the problem was accelerated by cutting the programmers. (GS has no
    boundaries)

    The talk of decoupling is just that. All these best
    business practices, coupled with objective based
    management, were rolled out globally, and OIL
    CANNOT SERVE AS AN ECONOMIC HUB in the new,
    virtual economies.

    The current bubble driver is primary, subsidized
    demand, largely in healthcare and education, across
    the industrialized world. Overconsumption is fairly
    common. Once the US levered up to create a massive
    center of gravity for capital, others had little
    choice, but to follow suit. The acid of disclosure
    is eating toward the middle.

    The healthcare bill is not about increasing coverage. It
    is about promising increased demand for healthcare to
    keep the bubble inflated, and to roll over the short term
    debt taken out to finance massive final cycle expansion
    of long term capital assets.

    There are going to be large employment cuts in both,
    regardless. In case someone just arrived from Mars,
    tax receipts have fallen through the floor, and, because
    of demographics and a decoupling of generations, those
    taxes will not resume. Yes, the Fed will continue to
    print computer money, the legacy families will continue
    to prime on the expectation of future returns, and real
    cash will continue to flow out of the pension funds and into the market for paper. But, the real money required to
    maintain, let alone grow, healthcare salaries simply isn’t
    there.

    Once we see the big employment cuts in these areas,
    along with the knock-off cuts, we can get past the “denial”
    stage.

    Let’s test your denial-ometer. If we build and roll out an
    effective education system across the internet, how many
    teachers will lose their jobs?

    Now bite hard for the background: we currently do not have
    an education system. We have a compliance system,
    which prepares students to comply in the workplace. The
    teachers are the lowest scoring college graduates, and
    would not have qualified for degrees 30 years ago, before
    the massive expansion of the make-work education
    system to replace manufacturing. The information
    economy thus became the service economy, and we have
    what we have: high school dropouts, with no real
    education, going to college, for no real future, except
    to replace $10/hr high school graduates with $10/hr
    college graduates, in an insolvent economy.

    The kids are not going to pay one dime of the debt.
    Because they were set up to fail, they moved on to
    alternative economies. These problems can be solved
    productively, if we choose to look at them. One way
    or the other, they will be solved.

    The Nation/State is already a myth for multi-national
    corporations, and their backers. On the current
    trajectory, they will soon be a myth for everyone.
    Basic physics tells us that every force results in
    the development of an equal and opposite force.

    Fighting over chairs on the Titanic.

    1. Skippy

      I’m warming to your straight froward style post by post.

      Skippy…concur would be another way of putting it.

  4. Swedish Lex

    Lets give them aid in the future in return for turning the country into a democracy & human rights (introducing religious freedom (incl. freedom from), speech, women, children, the works.)

  5. kevinearick

    oh yea, capital controls will not work;
    that horse is already out of the barn
    and long gone.

    capital control at this point only sinks
    the ship faster.

  6. Hugh

    If the Saudis want a subsidy for climate change, we should get one for peak oil.

    Charles Kiting has the best take of the evening.

  7. Ed

    To be fair, the Saudi’s actually tried to invest their oil wealth into building a more productive economy.

    The problem is that the kingdom is mostly desert, so there really wasn’t much to build on. They have some trade on the Red Sea. The pilgrimage to Mecca (and Medina) is an important source of revenue and the oil money did go towards upgrading facilities for the pilgrimage, that will help them in the future. Trying to build a knowledge based economy was not much of an option due to religious fundamentalism.

    The oil wealth fueled a population boom which will be a big problem in the future, to the extent it isn’t (high unemployment) already.

    You have an analogous problem with Michigan, car manufacturing took Detroit in the 20th century from a small city (about half a million people) to a large one (two million people). Michigan ex- auto manufacturing would have the population and economy of Wisconsin. Of course the adjustment is terrible for the people who have to live through it.

  8. David Matrink

    SAUDI’S ROT IN HELL. WE ARE FORCED TO BE RESPONSISBLE WITH OUR MONEY AND YOU WANT HELP???? HAHAHHAHAHHAHAH…. ENJOY. YOU’LL BE RIGHT BACK WHERE YOU WERE 1000 YEARS AGO. IN THE DESERT SELLING DATES… WE’LL HELP YOU LIKE YOU HELPED US IN 2004-2005 WITH 5 DOLLAR A GALLON GAS NEVER!!!!!!!!!

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