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When the US Fracks, Saudi Women Drive
Okay, maybe the correlation isn’t ironclad. But the fracking revolution and the drill-baby-drill spirit might have made some canny lads in the KSA look to the future, and figure out how to reconfigure the country for the 21st century. Depending on where you’ve heard about the exploits of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, you’ve heard a shallow, cliched narrative about palace intrigue and power consolidation. Huh, he’s jailing a bunch of tubby dudes in robes, taking their money: typical. Or you’ve heard about a guy who’s not just acceding to modernity, but pushing the issue faster than you’d expect if he was just making nice for the international press.
Read The Atlantic interview. Excerpt:
…when I asked him whether he believed the Jewish people have a right to a nation-state in at least part of their ancestral homeland, he said: “I believe that each people, anywhere, has a right to live in their peaceful nation. I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land.”
That’s more than you’ll get out of some European intellectuals.
Published in Foreign Policy
Who cares? Fracking hurts the environment, causes earthquakes, shoots fire out your toilet and causes porcine sterility. And Saudi women can drive but US women only earn 78.34295301¢ for every dollar a man earns. And the
joosIsraelis are Nazis.The Prince has been head spinning in the last year or two, modernizing and opening Saudi Arabia in ways I’d never have imagined possible. While the reality that petrodollars might no longer be able to prop up the old system no doubt plays a role, I’m hopeful that he’s also responding to and supported by a sense among workaday Saudis that it’s time for their country to join the modern world. If he’s too far out in front, I fear this will prove to be a feint and he’ll get cut off at the knees. But if he’s leading a willing nation, rather than forcing it, that brutal, authoritarian, terrorism exporting backwater might just genuinely join the civilized world. He’s fun to watch and hope inspiring anyway.
Absolute Monarch Drags Antedeluvian Society Into 19th Century. Film at 11!
Since the Department of Energy’s purpose is make us energy independent, can we declare that their job is done and eliminate this bureaucracy. Seems like an easy section of the swamp to drain.
Probably: He won’t last.
He is undermining the entire basis for the Saudi regime and the reforms are top down. His reforms are economic and not political. As a result, there will be no safety valve and the pressure will build and it will explode.
My guess is some Islamic fanatic close to the Prince will assassinate him because of the few social reforms he’s enacted. “He let women drive, now he says we can’t stone them?”
Hey, from the 7th century to the 19th is quite a hike.
or perhaps the head.
Thanks indeed for posting/sharing — quite an extraordinary interview.
I am an avid supporter of fracking and all avenues that the Trump Administration is taking to bolster (in some cases restore) the fossil-fuel vigor of the US; put another way, I feel that we can’t put the lunacy of Obama-era energy policy behind us fast enough.
That said, however important it is, fracking is clearly only one part of the array of issues propelling the Crown Prince’s endeavors — just as clearly (as is obvious from the way the interview is titled and framed), the Iranian threat is the most prominent constituent in this array.
In any event, I think that “MbS” pretty much schooled Jeffrey Goldberg throughout the interview (and I mean that in an entirely admiring way, something I was quite unprepared to think prior to reading the interview) — given that Goldberg did post-interview editing work on the material he came away with, it may well have been the case that MbS actually came close to chastising Goldberg, not merely riposting.
The prince sounds like a modern-day Peter the Great–trying to bring modernity to his country.
If only some Saudi women were employed by U.S. fracking companies , Saudi men could complain about “those frackin’ women drivers”.
The Shah tried this in Iran. Look where that got us.
Color me unconvinced; Whoever replaces the deposed and executed “Apostate Traitor, Mohammed Bin Salman” will nuke up in opposition to Iran, and then we’re all living on borrowed time.
I have no argument with any of you pessimists other than to say that I HOPE you’re mistaken.
That’s not the purpose of DoE. But I do agree with your sentiment. Creating a cabinet agency by bolting together various and sundry federal bureaucracies is a PR act for politicians and a jobs program for GS 11s.
Yes, I’m looking at you Departments of Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security!
https://www.energy.gov/about-us
Stoning women while they’re driving is almost impossible anyway.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think stoned women should drive.
The precursors to the DoE were the Energy Research and Development Agency (nuclear and atomic subjects) and the Federal Energy Administration (a bureaucracy charged with collecting and reporting energy production statistics/forecasts). Undeniably, the government has advertised energy independence as a desire. But actual public law and policy have been inconsistent and skewed toward liberal fantasies such as Synfuels and wind/solar. Talk about two diametrically opposed dreams. The other feature, always in tension with liberal fantasies, is the practical realization that Americans want, and vote for, low energy prices.