Forgive senior Saudi officials for their head-scratching in response to the simultaneous and contradictory demands from the Biden administration that Riyadh’s royals pump more oil into the world economy while reducing carbon emissions.
In my travels over the last two weeks — first to Riyadh to hear Minister of Energy Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman commit Saudi Arabia to net-zero by 2060, and then to Glasgow for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change conference – you could feel the reverberations from the first energy price shock of the green era.
The domestic and international politics of rising energy prices, with the cost of a basket of fossil fuels having doubled since last May and with blackouts in China and India, are colliding with the longer-term certainty that global leaders must more effectively address the dangers of a warming world.
I returned home this weekend to Washington with three…
