On the face of it, no country has more to lose from the transition away from fossil fuels than Saudi Arabia.
Before the discovery of oil, it barely existed as a nation. Its founding monarch Ibn Saud’s 1933 oil concession to Standard Oil Co. of California came just months after he was proclaimed king of a land that hadn’t been unified in 1,000 years.
Those concession payments, and later oil revenues, allowed Ibn Saud to cement his control by bestowing patronage on the peninsula’s fractious tribal groups, according to Ellen Wald, a fellow at the Atlantic Council and historian of the kingdom. The same sense of noblesse oblige lives on in the modern country’s cradle-to-grave welfare state.
“The concession legitimized him as the ruler of Saudi Arabia,” says Wald. “It’s very hard to conceive of a Saudi state without oil.”
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