No regime on earth is more threatened by both climate change and action on climate change than the House of Saud.
Saudi Arabia itself is glued together with crude and conquest. The cities of Mecca and Medina and their Hejaz region in the west of the country were for a thousand years a cosmopolitan hub of pilgrims and intellectualism. The oil fields lie beneath the eastern part of the Arabian peninsula with its historically seafaring and pearl-fishing people, whose shared culture and history lies more with the other Gulf states than their neighbours inland, and who include a large Shiite minority. Asir in the south-west borders Yemen, and has more rain and an agricultural history.
And in the centre is a vast plateau, the Najd. It was here in the 18th century that Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab launched his orthodox Sunni movement. It was from here that, in the early 20th century, Abdulaziz al Saud, armed and funded by the British empire, conquered the neighbouring states, naming the new country after himself and imposing those conservative, Wahabi ideas. It’s from here that his sons – every king since his death in 1953 has been one of his 45 sons – have ruled, the regional capital, Riyadh, becoming the country’s capital.
