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Oil prices are dropping, and while that might seem like good news for drivers, it could be bad news for our climate.

Crude oil prices have hovered around $100 per barrel in recent years, but they’ve been steadily dropping for the last two months and may continue to. On Monday, “Brent crude,” the global benchmark for oil prices, was trading below $85 per barrel. That translates into cheaper prices at the pump. From Sept. 15 to Oct. 20, average gas prices in the U.S. slid from $3.49 per gallon to $3.21.

2.2.1. Theoretical analysis: Why and how falling oil prices impact climate change?

A huge body of literature exists on the correlation between oil price and climate change [11], [13], [14], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42], [43].

A new dashboard from IISD and ODI begins to unpack the many ways in which different energy policies can affect inequality and poverty. The Inequality and Poverty Dashboard assesses the likely impacts of more than a thousand energy policies from the Energy Policy Tracker, adopted by 30 governments in advanced, emerging, and developing economies as well as European institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. It covers the period between January 2020 and November 2021.

How Do Energy Policies Affect Inequality and Poverty?

The head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, has been claiming that Europe’s surging energy prices have nothing to do with the continent’s shift toward renewables. Last month, he said “It is inaccurate and unfair to explain these high energy prices as a result of clean energy transition policies.” The statement may be politically astute, especially as the IEA pushes governments to triple spending on clean energy in order to cut emissions, but it is also wrong. Much of Europe’s current energy squeeze can be traced to its rapid transition to renewables. In fact, economists at the University of Chicago recently found that higher renewable penetration drives up energy prices.

Environmentalists have been telling us that wind and solar mean cheaper, cleaner energy. They herald a future of electric vehicles quietly zipping around on electricity that created thousands of green jobs. If all of this is true, why are we suffering from a global energy crisis just months after adding record amounts of new renewable capacity?

You might reasonably conclude that the destruction of Russia's economy is great news for the United States of America. After all, won't it humble Vladimir Putin, forcing him to finally back out of his disastrous Ukraine invasion, soften his growing hostility toward Europe and the US, and generally ratchet down the brinksmanship and aggression that have made him so troublesome?

Actually, it's the opposite. The odds are that Russia's freefalling economy will make Putin even more aggressive, more unpredictable, and less willing to compromise. The weaker that Russia becomes, the more dangerous it will get, and that's terrible news for everyone, including the US.

A collapsing economy. Much of Putin's popularity within Russia is traceable to the impressive recovery of the post-Soviet economy on his watch. Since he came to power in 2001, the country's gross domestic product has grown sixfold, greatly increasing the size and affluence of the Russian middle class. But that growth has been based in large part on the export of oil and gas to neighboring countries at a time when energy prices reached record highs. Now the price of oil has fallen at the same time that economic sanctions are beginning to bite. The ruble lost nearly half its value against the dollar last year, and the economy has begun to shrink. Putin blames sanctions for 25-30% of current economic hardships. Many Westerns believe a prolonged recession would weaken Putin's support, but because he can blame outsiders, economic troubles might actually strengthen his hand and accelerate the trend toward authoritarian rule.

A deep sense of grievance. Blaming outsiders for domestic troubles has a long pedigree in Russian political tradition, and it feeds into a deep-seated sense that Russia has been deprived of its rightful role in the world by the U.S. and other Western powers. Russia may have little past experience with democracy, but it was a major power for centuries prior to the collapse of communism. Like authoritarian rulers in other nations, Putin has built his political base by appealing to nationalism, fashioning a revisionist view of recent events in which Russia is the victim rather that the author of its own misfortunes. He has called the break-up of the Soviet Union a tragedy of epic proportions, and apparently really believes it. By tapping into a deep vein of resentment in Russian political culture, Putin has created a broad constituency for standing up to outsiders even if it means prolonged economic hardship and the danger of war.

If history is any guide, Vladimir Putin's iron grip on Russia could be threatened by the lowest oil prices in a decade. It also partly explains his increasingly belligerent stance toward the West.

Crude oil and natural gas prices have been central to Russian prosperity for decades. As they fluctuated, so did the country's fortunes. And they have led Russia to outward aggression before and could again.

More importantly, America’s position has changed in the world, allowing a resurgent Russia, rising China, and awakening India to challenge each other and American hegemony. The Middle East has become an important arena of their competition, especially because of oil. Half of China’s oil comes out of the Persian Gulf to fuel the economic rise of what is now the world’s largest oil importer. India, the world’s third-leading oil importer, gets more than half of its oil from the region, and India is also the world’s leading recipient of labor remittances from overseas workers, primarily from laborers employed in the Persian Gulf. The second-leading oil exporter in the world, Russia is interested in Middle Eastern oil primarily for what its availability and pricing do to the market for Russian oil. Other Russian interests in the Middle East include arms sales, base access (its only bases outside of the traditional Soviet zone are in Syria), and the creation and expansion of an anti-access/area-denial zone in the Black Sea region. Meanwhile, this is happening as the global position of the United States has slipped during an Obama Administration that struggled to “lead from behind” and a Trump Administration marked by erratic swings from foreign policy adventurism to “America First” neo-isolationism. Powerful nations with competing interests often find that the collision of those interests leads to war. Having so many great power interests converge in a part of the world that has historically been an active arena of conflict is worrisome. Since the late 1970s, the region has had the highest number of fatalities due to war. Three of the world’s top five countries in military spending per capita are Middle Eastern (Saudi Arabia is first, Israel is third, and Kuwait is fifth). Middle Eastern countries have also developed or pursued weapons of mass destruction, with Israel widely known to have nuclear weapons and a robust delivery capability, while seven Middle Eastern countries have or have had biological or chemical weapons. Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq currently occupy the bottom three spots on the Global Peace Index. As great power competition resurfaces and now takes place in a conflict-prone, unstable Middle East, the question seems not to be if great power conflict will occur, but when.

A Third Gulf War would distinguish itself from recent Middle Eastern conflicts by the geographic span of the fighting and the number of major actors that might become involved. In all likelihood, the field of battle would stretch from the shores of the Mediterranean, where Lebanon abuts Israel, to the Strait of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf empties into the Indian Ocean. Participants could include, on one side, Iran, the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and assorted Shia militias in Iraq and Yemen; and, on the other, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). If the fighting in Syria were to get out of hand, Russian forces could even become involved. All of these forces have been equipping themselves with massive arrays of modern weaponry in recent years, ensuring that any fighting will be intense, bloody, and horrifically destructive. Iran has been acquiring an assortment of modern weapons from Russia and possesses its own substantial arms industry. It, in turn, has been supplying the Assad regime with modern arms and is suspected of shipping an array of missiles and other munitions to Hezbollah. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have long been major recipients of tens of billions of dollars of sophisticated American weaponry and President Trump has promised to supply them with so much more. This means that, once ignited, a Third Gulf War could quickly escalate and would undoubtedly generate large numbers of civilian and military casualties, and new flows of refugees. The United States and its allies would try to quickly cripple Iran’s war-making capabilities, a task that would require multiple waves of air and missile strikes, some surely directed at facilities in densely populated areas. Iran and its allies would seek to respond by attacking high-value targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia, including cities and oil facilities. Iran’s Shia allies in Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere could be expected to launch attacks of their own on the U.S.-led alliance. Where all this would lead, once such fighting began, is of course impossible to predict, but the history of the twenty-first century suggests that, whatever happens, it won’t follow the carefully laid plans of commanding generals (or their civilian overseers) and won’t end either expectably or well. Precisely what kind of incident or series of events would ignite a war of this sort is similarly unpredictable. Nonetheless, it seems obvious that the world is moving ever closer to a moment when the right (or perhaps the better word is wrong) spark could set off a chain of events leading to full-scale hostilities in the Middle East in the wake of President Trump’s recent rejection of the nuclear deal. It’s possible, for instance, to imagine a clash between Israeli and Iranian military contingents in Syria sparking such a conflict. The Iranians, it is claimed, have set up bases there both to support the Assad regime and to funnel arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon. On May 10th, Israeli jets struck several such sites, following a missile barrage on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights said to have been launched by Iranian soldiers in Syria. More Israeli strikes certainly lie in our future as Iran presses its drive to establish and control a so-called land bridge through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon. Another possible spark could involve collisions or other incidents between American and Iranian naval vessels in the Persian Gulf, where the two navies frequently approach each other in an aggressive manner. Whatever the nature of the initial clash, rapid escalation to full-scale hostilities could occur with very little warning. All of this begs a question: Why are the United States and its allies in the region moving ever closer to another major war in the Persian Gulf? Why now? The Geopolitical Impulse The first two Gulf Wars were driven, to a large extent, by the geopolitics of oil. After World War II, as the United States became increasingly dependent on imported sources of petroleum, it drew ever closer to Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading oil producer. Under the Carter Doctrine of January 1980, the U.S. pledged for the first time to use force, if necessary, to prevent any interruption in the flow of oil from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to this country and its allies. Ronald Reagan, the first president to implement that doctrine, authorized the "reflagging" of Saudi and Kuwaiti oil tankers with the stars and stripes during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War that began in 1980 and their protection by the U.S. Navy. When Iranian gunboats menaced such tankers, American vessels drove them off in incidents that represented the first actual military clashes between the U.S. and Iran. At the time, President Reagan put the matter in no uncertain terms: “The use of the sea lanes of the Persian Gulf will not be dictated by the Iranians.” Oil geopolitics also figured prominently in the U.S. decision to intervene in the First Gulf War. When Iraqi forces occupied Kuwait in August 1990 and appeared poised to invade Saudi Arabia, President George H.W. Bush announced that the U.S. would send forces to defend the kingdom and so played out the Carter Doctrine in real time. “Our country now imports nearly half the oil it consumes and could face a major threat to its economic independence,” he declared, adding that “the sovereign independence of Saudi Arabia is of vital interest to the United States.” Although the oil dimension of U.S. strategy was less obvious in President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, it was still there. Members of his inner circle, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the safety of Persian Gulf oil lanes and needed to be eliminated. Others in the administration were eager to pursue the prospect of privatizing Iraq’s state-owned oil fields and turning them over to American oil companies (a notion that evidently stuck in Donald Trump’s mind, as he repeatedly asserted during the 2016 election campaign that “we should have kept the oil”). Today, oil has receded, if not entirely disappeared, as a major factor in Persian Gulf geopolitics, while other issues have moved to the fore. Of greatest significance in animating the current military standoff is an escalating struggle for regional dominance between Iran and Saudi Arabia (with a nuclear-armed Israel lurking in the wings). Both countries view themselves as the hub of a network of like-minded states and societies -- Iran as the leader of the region’s Shia populations, Saudi Arabia of its Sunnis -- and both resent any gains by the other. To complicate matters, President Trump, clearly harboring deep antipathy toward the Iranians, has chosen to side with the Saudis big league (as he might say), while Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, fearing Iranian advances in the region, has opted to weigh in on the Saudi side of the equation in a major way as well. The result, as suggested by military historian Andrew Bacevich, is the “inauguration of a Saudi-American-Israeli axis” and a “major realignment of U.S. strategic relationships.” Several key factors explain this transition from an oil-centric strategy emphasizing military power to a more conventional struggle among regional rivals that has already deeply embroiled the planet’s last superpower. To begin with, America’s reliance on imported oil has diminished rapidly in recent years, thanks to an oil drilling revolution in the U.S. that has allowed the massive exploitation of domestic shale reserves through the process of fracking. As a result, access to Persian Gulf supplies matters far less in Washington than it did in previous decades. In 2001, according to oil giant BP, the United States relied on imports for 61% of its net oil consumption; by 2016, that share had dropped to 37% and was still falling -- and yet the U.S. remains deeply involved in the region as a decade and a half of unending war, counterinsurgency, drone strikes, and other kinds of strife sadly indicate. By invading and occupying Iraq in 2003, Washington also eliminated a major bulwark of Sunni power, a country led by Saddam Hussein who, two decades earlier, had been siding with the U.S. in opposing Iran. That invasion, ironically enough, had the effect of expanding Shiite influence and making Iran the major -- possibly the only -- winner in the years of war that followed. Some Western analysts believe that the greatest tragedy of the invasion, from a geopolitical point of view, was the ascension of Shiite politicians with close ties to Tehran in post-Hussein Iraq. Although that country’s current leaders appear intent on pursuing a path of their own in the post-ISIS moment, many powerful Iraqi Shiite militias -- including some that played key roles in driving Islamic State militants out of Mosul and other major cities -- retain close ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. While disasters in themselves, the wars in Syria and Yemen have only added additional complexity to the geopolitical chessboard on which Washington found itself after that invasion and from which it has never extricated itself. In Syria, Iran has chosen to ally with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to preserve the brutal Assad regime, providing it with arms, funds, and an unknown number of advisers from the Revolutionary Guards. Hezbollah, a Shiite political group in Lebanon with a significant military wing, has sent large numbers of its own fighters to Syria to help Assad’s forces. In Yemen, the Iranians are believed to be providing arms and missile technology to the Houthis, a homegrown Shiite rebel group that now controls the northern half of the country, including the capital, Sana’a. The Saudis, in turn, have been playing an ever more active role in bolstering their military power and protecting embattled Sunni communities throughout the region. Seeking to resist and reverse what they view as Iranian advances, they have helped armmilitias of an extreme sort and evidently even al-Qaeda-associated groups under attack from Iranian-backed Shiite forces in Iraq and Syria. In 2015, in the case of Yemen, they organized a coalition of Sunni Arab states to crush the Houthi rebels in a brutal war that has included a blockade of the country, helping to produce mass famine and a relentless American-backed air campaign, which often hits civilian targets including markets, schools, and weddings. This combination has helped produce an estimated 10,000 civilian deaths and a singular humanitarian crisis in that already impoverished country. In response to these developments, the Obama administration sought to calm the situation by negotiating a nuclear deal with the Iranians and by holding out the promise of increased economic ties with the West in return for reduced assertiveness outside its borders. Such a strategy never, however, won the support of Israel or Saudi Arabia. And in the Obamayears, Washington continued to support both of those countries in a major way, including supplying massive amounts of military equipment, refueling Saudi planes in midair so they could strike deeper into Yemen, and providing the Saudis with targeting intelligence for their disastrous war. The Anti-Iranian Triumvirate All of these regional developments, in play before Donald Trump was elected, have only gained added momentum since then, thanks in no small degree to the pivotal personalities involved. The first of them, of course, is President Trump. Throughout his election campaign, he regularly denounced the nuclear deal that Iran, the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union all signed onto in July 2015. Officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement forced Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program in return for the lifting of all nuclear-related sanctions. It was a plan that Iran scrupulously adhered to. Although President Obama, many senior American policymakers, and most European leaders had argued that the JCPOA -- whatever its flaws -- provided a valuable constraint on Iran’s nuclear (and so other) ambitions, Trump consistently denounced it as a “terrible deal” because it failed to eliminate every last vestige of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure or ban that country’s missile program. “This deal was a disaster,” he told David Sanger of the New York Times in March 2016. While Trump, who has filled his administration with Iranophobes, including his new secretary of state and new national security adviser, seems to harbor a primeval animosity toward the Iranians, perhaps because they don’t treat him with the adoration he feels he deserves, he has a soft spot for the Saudi royals, who do. In May 2017, on his first trip abroad as president, he traveled to Riyadh, where he performed a sword dance with Saudi princes and immersed himself in the sort of ostentatious displays of wealth only oil potentates can provide. While in Riyadh, he conferred at length with then-Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 31-year-old son of King Salman and a key architect of Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical contest with the Iranians. Prince Mohammed, who serves as the Saudi defense minister and was named crown prince in June 2017, is the prime mover behind the kingdom’s (so far unsuccessful) drive to crush the Houthi rebels in Yemen and is known to harbor fierce anti-Iranian views. At an earlier White House luncheon in March 2017, bin Salman, or MBS as he’s sometimes known, and President Trump seemed to reach an implicit agreement on a common strategy for branding Iran a regional threat, tearing up the nuclear agreement, and so setting the stage for an eventual war to vanquish that country or at least to fell the regime that runs it. While in Riyadh, President Trump told a conference of Sunni Arab leaders that, “from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen, Iran funds, arms, and trains terrorists, militias, and other extremist groups that spread destruction and chaos across the region. It is a government that speaks openly of mass murder, vowing the destruction of Israel, death of America, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this very room.” While no doubt gratifying to the Saudis, Emiratis, Kuwaitis, and other Sunni rulers listening, those words echoed the views of the third key player in the strategic triumvirate that may soon drive the region into all-out war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also known as “Bibi.” For years, he has railed against Iranian ambitions in the region and threatened military action against any Iranian move that would, as he saw it, impinge on Israeli security. Now, in Trump and the Saudi Crown Prince, he has the allies of his dreams. In the Obama years, Netanyahu was a fierce opponent of the Iranian nuclear deal and used a rare appearance before a joint session of Congress in March 2015 to denounce it in no uncertain terms. He has never -- right up to the days before Trump withdrew from the accord -- stopped working to persuade the president that the agreement should be junked and Iran targeted. In that 2015 speech to Congress, Netanyahu laid out a vision of Iran as a systemic danger that would later be appropriated by Trump and his Saudi confederates in Riyadh. “Iran's regime poses a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world,” he asserted in a typically hyperbolic statement. “Backed by Iran, Assad is slaughtering Syrians. Backed by Iran, Shiite militias are rampaging through Iraq. Backed by Iran, Houthis are seizing control of Yemen, threatening the strategic strait at the mouth of the Red Sea. Along with the Straits of Hormuz, that would give Iran a second choke-point on the world’s oil supply.” Now, Netanyahu is playing a major role in driving the already crippled region into a war that could further destroy it, produce yet more terror groups (and terrorized civilians), and create havoc on a potentially global scale, given that both Russia and China back the Iranians. Girding for War Pay attention to the words of Netanyahu in Washington and Donald Trump in Riyadh. Think of them not as political rhetoric, but as prophesies of a grim kind. You’re going to be hearing a lot more such prophesies in the months ahead as the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia move closer to war with Iran and its allies. While ideology and religion will play a part in what follows, the underlying impetus is a geopolitical struggle for control of the greater Persian Gulf region, with all its riches, between two sets of countries, each determined to prevail. No one can say with certainty when, or even if, these powerful forces will produce a devastating new war or set of wars in the Middle East. Other considerations -- an unexpected flare-up on the Korean Peninsula if President Trump’s talks with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un end in failure, a fresh crisis with Russia, a global economic meltdown -- could turn attention elsewhere, lessening the importance of the geopolitical contest in the Persian Gulf. New leadership in any of the key countries could similarly lead to a change of course. Netanyahu, for example, is now at risk of losing power because of an ongoing Israeli police investigation into allegedly corrupt acts of his, and Trump, well, who can say? Without such a development or developments, however, the way to war, which will surely prove to be the road to hell, seems open with a Third Gulf War looming on humanity’s horizon.

I was here last week to interview Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Tikvah Israel Security Conclave. The interview, available on the Journal’s website, combined a tour d’horizon of Mr. Netanyahu’s view of world politics with some candid reflections on the history of Zionism. As for the rest of the conference, I came away thinking that the U.S. is much closer to getting involved in another Middle East war than most in Washington understand, and that minimizing this danger requires rapid and sweeping policy change from an administration still struggling to comprehend the most serious international crisis since the late 1930s.

The Biden administration came to office with an elegant and cohesive geopolitical strategy. It would address the China challenge by driving wedges between China and its fellow revisionist powers. It would park Russia by accommodating Vladimir Putin and stabilize the Middle East by reviving the nuclear deal with Iran even as it pursued aggressive trade and security policies to limit China’s rise.

Vladimir Putin’s hope that oil and gas revenues would help Russia’s economy weather the storm of sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine took a big hit in December, when Russian fossil fuel sales collapsed.

Russia’s fossil fuel export revenues fell 17% last month to their lowest level since before the war began, according to a study published Wednesday by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), an independent think tank based in Finland that focuses on energy and pollution.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has a well-earned reputation as an astute tactician and a steely decision-maker. Yet over the past few weeks he has mismanaged Russia’s responses to two major crises: the collapse of the oil market and the coronavirus pandemic. Now he is facing one of the most acute challenges to his rule right at the moment when he had thought it safe to extend his term through a constitutional referendum.

The Kremlin’s first mistake came in early March, when it reacted to falling oil prices by rejecting Saudi entreaties to cut production. The Russian decision to push for an oil glut proved to be singularly mistimed.

The U.S. derives its energy consumption from five primary sources: petroleum, natural gas, coal, nuclear, and renewables or green energy. In 1950, U.S. energy consumption was dominated by petroleum and coal. By 2019, nearly 70 years later, petroleum was still number one, natural gas was a close second, renewables were third, and coal was number four. The use of renewables has been rising steadily in recent decades and by 2019 it was the third most consumed primary energy source in America. In short, there is a groundswell of support for cleaner fuels. Yes, things are changing, and change is rarely easy. Which countries will be most affected by this transition to renewable energy? What will the U.S. energy complex look like in 20 or 30 years? While that’s hard to say, here are a few things to watch.

U.S. primary energy consumption by major sources, 1950-2019

A price cap on Russian oil, set by the US and its allies, is likely to come to pass in the next few weeks. One question is how such a cap might operate. Another is whether it is a good idea. The complicated and uncertain answer to the first question is a reason to be uneasy about the second.

A price cap makes economic sense. But far more than economics is at stake here. Russia sells oil at a significant profit, and the price cap limits some of that profit. Russia gets about 30% of its entire federal budget from oil and gas revenues, so taking that away will hurt President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Several foreign ministers gathered in an Asian capital to negotiate an end to regional turmoil. One of the countries represented at the meeting brokered an agreement to end hostilities between the others.

This could be the 2023 Beijing agreement to normalize relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. But it could also be Bangkok in 1967, when Thailand’s foreign minister helped forge an agreement to end hostilities between Indonesia and Malaysia. It was at this meeting that the concept for one of the world’s most successful regional organizations was born: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

On March 6, 2023, representatives from Iran and Saudi Arabia met in Beijing for discussions brokered by China. Four days later, Riyadh and Tehran announced that they had decided to normalize relations. This landmark agreement has the potential to transform the Middle East by realigning its major powers, replacing the current Arab-Iranian divide with a complex web of relationships, and weaving the region into China’s global ambitions. For Beijing, the announcement was a great leap forward in its rivalry with Washington.

It was not supposed to be this way. It was the United States that had encouraged Iran and Saudi Arabia to start discussions, in 2021, in an effort to reduce tensions between the Gulf rivals, advance nuclear talks, and bring an end to the conflict in Yemen. Tehran and Riyadh held five rounds of direct talks, and informal conversations continued thereafter. Then, during his visit to Saudi Arabia in July 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden urged the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—an intergovernmental union of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—to join with Israel to contain Iran. But the Saudi government turned to China instead, viewing President Xi Jinping as a better mediator with Tehran. Involving China, the Saudis believed, was the surest guarantee that a deal with Iran would last, since Tehran would be unlikely to risk jeopardizing its relations with Beijing by violating such a deal. Xi discussed the issue with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during his visit to Riyadh in December 2022 and then met with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Beijing in February 2023. Intense discussions between Iran and Saudi Arabia followed, during which the two sides agreed to bury the hatchet and normalize relations. For both countries, Xi’s personal intervention was critical. Both have long-standing political and economic ties with Beijing, and the Chinese president was, therefore, able to act as a trusted broker between them.

This research dealt with the transformations of the Iranian-Saudi relations, which witnessed great tension during the recent period, as the factors of those tensions were reviewed and analyzed in detail, and this research focused on three main axes. The first axis dealt with the reasons that pushed the Saudi-Iranian relations to rapprochement in the recent period, which includes recognition of the Iranian reality and a joint dialogue between the two parties. The second axis touched on the factors that led to strained relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which include the struggle for regional influence in the Middle East, religious and sectarian differences between Sunnis and Shiites, interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries, and conflict over regional issues such as Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. The third axis dealt with the transformations that occurred in the Iranian-Saudi relations during the recent period, and analyzed the positive effects that would be reflected in the region in the event of the continuation of this rapprochement. The obstacles that could face this convergence were also analyzed. In the end, it was emphasized that the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran is an important step towards peace and stability in the region, and that the two parties must continue dialogue and negotiation and overcome differences to achieve the interests of the people in the region in general.

No region of the world is more immersed in the consequences of global climate change than the Middle East. The region accounts for about 30 percent of global oil production, and oil revenues drive government revenues in the region—either because the countries produce oil, or because the countries produce a labor force that works in oil-exporting countries and sends money home. Because of oil revenues, Middle Eastern governments can afford to employ large percentages of their own populations, and they do. As the world turns away from oil as an energy source, the economics of the Middle East will change profoundly.

At the same time, the Middle East is subject to the consequences of climate change. The region is already desperately water poor—nine of the ten most water-poor countries are in the Middle East. Drought is pushing farmers off their land, the region’s many coastal cities are threatened by sea level rise, and rising summer temperatures increasingly combine with humidity to put human survival at risk.

The low oil price environment in the global market is dragging the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries to collapse, whose economies are strongly dependent on crude oil production and exports.

Due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) keeping global oil consumption weak, and the oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, crude oil prices are fluctuating below $30 per barrel since March 6 when OPEC and non-OPEC nations failed to reach an output curb deal.

The low oil price environment in the global market is dragging the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries to collapse, whose economies are strongly dependent on crude oil production and exports.

Due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) keeping global oil consumption weak, and the oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, crude oil prices are fluctuating below $30 per barrel since March 6 when OPEC and non-OPEC nations failed to reach an output curb deal.