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Second year in a row for the United Nations climate conference in Dubai

For the second year in a row, world leaders met in the Arab world to negotiate the future of the planet. As a backdrop to the United Nations climate conference in Dubai, it’s a fitting venue for a planet-wide shift that scientists say needs to happen: The region has extensive deposits of oil and gas, but also immense, untapped potential for renewable energy.

Over the past several years, European governments and corporations have made moves to capitalize off this potential, investing in sprawling mega-projects to capture the sun’s energy from the region’s vast deserts and export the electricity north. The oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, which constitute the region’s financial and geopolitical powerhouses, are also developing green hydrogen plants and wind and solar farms, with the aim of using renewable energy domestically in order to free up more of their fuel reserves for export. Activists and locals worry that the flurry of new mega-projects will reproduce the same exploitative practices associated with the fossil fuel industry: land grabbing, unchecked pollution, and the disenfranchisement of indigenous people.

More than a decade after the start of the Arab Spring, when popular protests against repression and economic stagnation erupted from Tunisia to Syria, many of the same or equally oppressive power structures remain in place. Some of these governments appear to be prioritizing European countries’ renewable energy needs before meeting the demands of their populations. Given these challenges, what might a shift away from fossil fuels look like in the Arab world, one that distributes the benefits across the population, and what might other countries stand to learn from it?

This is the question that Hamza Hamouchene, an Algerian researcher-activist, has been exploring over the past five years. As part of his work with the Transnational Institute, an international research and advocacy institute based in Amsterdam, he has interviewed people across the region to ask about their experiences living near oil and gas deposits and planned renewable energy mega-projects. One of the products of that research is a new book of essays, edited by Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, also of the Translational Institute, and titled Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region.

Underlying the book is the unequivocal urgency of moving away from fossil fuels in this part of the world. Large swaths of the Middle East and North Africa are warming at almost twice the rate of the global average, with devastating effects. But rather than serve the communities of the Arab world, many of the proposed renewable projects are for exporting energy abroad, and will do little to serve local people. Meanwhile, Gulf states have indicated their determination to extract every drop of fuel from their land. Grist sat down with Hamouchene to discuss COP28, the new book, and the future of the region’s renewable energy. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Lylla Younes: Why should people who care about getting the world off fossil fuels pay attention to what’s happening in the Arab world.

Hamza Hamouchene: First of all, clearly, there are many examples in the region of what some people call sacrifice zones [to serve] the energy transition in Europe, through export-oriented projects and land grabbing. Second, if we look at the numbers, just in 2021, 35 percent of the oil produced in the world was produced by the Middle East. The region is a nodal point of the global fossil fuel regime. This is described by Adam Haniah, in his excellent chapter of the book. He’s raising a warning to the climate justice movement and saying that the Middle Eastern countries, especially the Gulf countries, are going to be indisputable protagonists in any discussion around phasing out fossil fuels. And we are seeing this right now, in COP28 in the Emirates, where Sultan Al Jaber, the President of COP28, is an oil executive and the president of the Abu Dhabi Oil Company.

Lylla Younes: And last month, several newsrooms reported on leaked briefing documents that revealed Jaber’s plans to use COP28 to secure fossil fuel deals, and the following week he came under fire for denying the science of climate change.

Hamza Hamouchene: Right, that’s the thing. These Gulf countries will constitute a really huge challenge to that transition away from fossil fuels. So for the global climate justice movement, if they just focus on Western companies like BP, Shell, or Exxon Mobil, they are missing the point. You need to focus on Gulf capital as well, and that is tied up with the question of democratization in the region and the redistribution of wealth in the region.

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