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a solar mega-project that is supposedly going to end Morocco's dependency on energy imports, provide electricity to more than a million Moroccans, and put the country on a “green path.”

This analysis examines the project through the lens of the creation of a new commodity chain, revealing its effects as no different from the destructive mining activities taking place in southern Morocco.

What seems to unite all the reports and articles written about the solar plant is a deeply erroneous assumption that any move toward renewable energy is to be welcomed. And that any shift from fossil fuels, regardless of how it is carried out, will help us to avert climate chaos. One needs to say it clearly from the start: the climate crisis we are currently facing is not attributable to fossil fuels per se, but rather to their unsustainable and destructive use in order to fuel the capitalist machine. In other words, capitalism is the culprit, and if we are serious in our endeavors to tackle the climate crisis (only one facet of the multi-dimensional crisis of capitalism), we cannot elude questions of radically changing our ways of producing and distributing things, our consumption patterns and fundamental issues of equity and justice. It follows from this that a mere shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, while remaining in the capitalist framework of commodifying and privatizing nature for the profits of the few, will not solve the problem. In fact, if we continue down this path we will only end up exacerbating, or creating another set of problems, around issues of ownership of land and natural resources.

today’s largest volumes of global seaborne crude oil – around 30% – along with a significant volume of LNG, passes through its Straits of Hormuz, making it the most important maritime oil chokepoint which connects the Gulf states with key global markets in the East and the West

The International Energy Agency (IEA) sees that the world can reach net-zero emissions by 2060, wherein 75% of reduction comes from energy efficiency and renewable energy, with another 14% from carbon capture and storage, 6% from nuclear and 5% from fuel switching. In this context, the fossil fuels’ share of the global energy mix falls from 82% in 2014 to 35% in 2060 under the 2°C scenario, or to 26% in the below 2°C scenario.

Renewable technologies and batteries require certain minerals for their production, such as cobalt, lithium, nickel and rare earth elements. Despite the fact that renewable endowments for wind, solar, geothermal and biomass are scattered geographically, controlling the production of these new commodities will have major geopolitical consequences as they are based only in a selected number of countries such as Chile, Bolivia, Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Guided by the twin logics of energy security and energy independence, American actions and alliances in region became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The very thing the United States sought to eliminate in the Middle East—insecurity—became a major consequence of America’s growing and increasingly militarized entanglement.

In effect, the essential relationship of dependency between the United States and the Middle East has never been “oil for security.” It has in fact been oil for insecurity, a dynamic in which war, militarization and autocracy in the region have been entangled with the economic dominance of North Atlantic oil companies, US hegemony and discourses of energy security.

Oil’s violent geopolitics is often assumed to result from the immense power its natural scarcity affords to those who can control it. Recent developments in global hydrocarbon markets, which saw negative prices on April 20, 2020 have once again put this scarcity myth to bed

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced in Istanbul that the Fatih drilling ship has discovered reserves of 320 billion cubic metres of natural gas in the Black Sea, and that Turkey will start using this in 2023

Turkey depends on imports for its oil and gas requirements. Last year, consumption of natural gas in the country was 44.9 billion cubic metres, and 99 per cent of this came from countries such as Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan. The gas discovered by the Fatih will reduce this total dependence on foreign energy supplies and strengthen Ankara’s position in energy deals

Turkish research and exploration vessels are confident that new fields will be discovered, helping Turkey to move from being an energy importer to an exporter.

On Feb. 24, Russia invaded Ukraine, and sanctions imposed on Russia by Western states led to surging food, fuel, and fertilizer prices. Burkina Faso saw two successful coups and a third foiled putsch. There were failed power grabs in São Tomé and Príncipe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and against Mali’s military junta, sparked by armed groups’ escalating attacks and creeping inflation on food and services. It was a continuation of a trajectory set in 2021, a year that saw four successful coups in Africa (in Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Sudan).

Tunisia is just one of many countries experiencing a rollback of democratic gains. Amid an economic crisis worsened by the pandemic and made even more acute by the war in Ukraine, democratic backsliding is increasing. As reported in Africa Brief this year, Sudan’s democratic future still hangs in the balance, and Mali’s putsch leaders agreed to a two-year democratic transition that would allow coup leader Col. Assimi Goïta and other military members to run in general elections in 2024. Ibrahim Traoré, an army captain in Burkina Faso, proclaimed himself the new president of the country’s military junta in the country’s second coup in eight months while Guinea’s military rulers issued a three-year ban on public demonstrations to combat growing calls for democracy. And around 50 people were killed by security forces as Chadians took to the streets to demand a quicker transition to democratic rule.

Recent elections in Kenya and Angola showed democratic gains as Kenyans defied their outgoing president’s chosen successor and young Angolans increasingly challenged their one-party state. Africans want more democracy even if their leaders want less of it.

Saudi Arabian King Salman traveled to China Thursday to deepen economic ties between the world’s biggest oil exporter and the world’s second-largest oil consumer. It’s a key stop in the king’s six-week trip to Asia that comes as Riyadh struggles with a slumping oil market and a desperate need to diversify its economy.

up to $65 billion worth of economic and trade deals, spanning sectors from energy to space

more than 20 agreements on oil investments and in renewable energy

Vicious Saudi autocrat Mohamed bin Salman has a new vision for Neom, his plan for a massive, $500 billion, AI-powered, nominally legally independent city-state of the future on the border with Egypt and Jordan. When we last left the crown prince, he had reportedly commissioned 2,300-pages’ worth of proposals from Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co. and Oliver Wyman boasting of possible amenities like holographic schoolteachers, cloud seeding to create rain, flying taxis, glow-in-the-dark beaches, a giant NASA-built artificial moon, and lots of robots: maids, cage fighters, and dinosaurs.

Now Salman has a bold new idea: One of the cities in Neom is a line. A line roughly 105-miles (170-kilometers) long and a five-minute walk wide, to be exact. No, really, it’s a line. The proposed city is a line that stretches across all of Saudi Arabia. That’s the plan.

“With zero cars, zero streets, and zero carbon emissions, you can fulfill all your daily requirements within a five minute walk,” the crown prince continued. “And you can travel from end to end within 20 minutes.”AdvertisementThe end-to-end in 20 minutes boast likely refers to some form of mass transit that doesn’t yet exist. That works out to a transit system running at about 317 mph (510 kph). That would be much faster than Japan’s famous Shinkansen train network, which is capped at 200 mph (321 kph). Some Japanese rail companies have tested maglev trains that have gone up to 373 mph (600 kph), though it’s nowhere near ready for primetime.

Egypt has begun devaluing its currency to help revive the economy and meet the conditions of an expected IMF loan and the depreciation has further to go, a business leader in the ruling Muslim Brotherhood said

"We have started already some increase in taxation, and there is the devaluation of the pound and we raised some prices of petrol and gas," Malek said in an interview."Normal people in the street now understand that there is a price that we will have to pay for the IMF agreement."Asked whether he expected a further depreciation of the Egyptian currency to help exports and tourism, he said: "I'm not of course a technical (expert) but people expect a little bit of devaluation in the future."

Malek, who was imprisoned under Mubarak with top Muslim Brotherhood leader Khairat el-Shater, his friend and business partner, said he was actively trying to persuade wealthy Egyptians to return and invest in the country.Asked if he was personally involved in trying to persuade billionaires who have left Egypt and had their assets frozen or been convicted of economic crimes to come home, he said "Yes. I am inviting everyone to come to Egypt. It is very important to prioritize legislation and court cases should be solved first... before these people come back."

A $30 million, high-tech agricultural facility covering 10 hectares in the desert in Tunisia’s south is scheduled to open in 2018. The facility, which is a highly sophisticated green house, will use solar energy to power its operations and seawater to irrigate crops and maintain humidity. The extracted salt from the seawater will also be sold commercially.

hoped to be a new environmental solution to create green jobs through profitable production of food, water, clean electricity and biomass in desert areas. The first pilot project opened in Qatar in December 2012, and another facility will be launched in Jordan later this year

Although there are no numbers or estimates available for Tunisia yet, the Qatar facility directly employs 6,000 people, with a further support staff of 30,000. Tunisian unemployment is estimated around 15 percent countrywide and even higher among young college graduates

This note will briefly outline the notion of an Arab “variety of capitalism” characterized by the central role of a distributive state whose interventions lead to a deep, and at least in parts unintended, segmentation of business and labour markets into insiders and outsiders. It will explain how this model has led to economic stagnation and contributed to the uprisings of 2011 as well as how it has hobbled economic adjustment after the uprisings, both under anciens and new regimes. Its pessimistic conclusion is that distributional institutions in most Arab countries remain very sticky, having created powerful vested interests not only in business but also in society at large that undermine the negotiation of a new “social contract” – a concept that many are talking about but no one seems to be able to map out in any detail.

Authoritarian-populist republics like Algeria, Egypt, (pre-war) Syria and Tunisia have achieved particularly good human development scores considering their modest levels of wealth (figure 3).

While Arab governments’ ambition to provide might have led to solid coverage of basic services, most Arab states have pledged much wider material guarantees to their citizens – typically beyond their fiscal and administrative capacity, especially once economic growth started stalling in the 1970s. The result has been a rigid insider-outsider division in which some benefit from Arab governments’ relative generosity while others remain excluded.

People in the West tend to think about oil shocks from the perspective of the consumer. They notice when prices go up. The price spikes in 1973 and 1979 triggered by boycotts by oil producers are etched in their collective consciousness, as price controls left Americans lining up for gas and European governments imposed weekend driving bans. This was more than an economic shock. The balance of power in the world economy seemed to be shifting from the developed to the developing world.

If a surge in fossil fuel prices rearranges the world economy, the effect also operates in reverse. For the vast majority of countries in the world, the decline in oil prices is a boon. Among emerging markets, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Argentina, Turkey, and South Africa all benefit, as imported fuel is a big part of their import bill. Cheaper energy will cushion the pain of the COVID-19 recession. But at the same time, and by the same token, plunging oil prices deliver a concentrated and devastating shock to the producers. By comparison with the diffuse benefit enjoyed by consumers, the producers suffer immediate immiseration.

In inflation-adjusted terms, oil prices are similar to those last seen in the 1950s, when the Persian Gulf states were little more than clients of the oil majors, the United States and the British Empire

In Qatar, the country with the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world and the biggest producer of liquid gas, the outdoors is already being air conditioned.

The Gulf States are still highly reliant on oil and gas exports, which remain more than 70% of total goods exports in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman, and on oil revenues, which exceed 70% of total government revenues in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. In Vision 2030, published in 2016, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, promised to turn the country into a diversified industrial power house. The reality is very different. The World Bank shows Saudi Arabia is still 75% dependent on oil exports for its budget.

The Middle East is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. By the end of the century, if the more dire predictions prove true, Mecca may not be habitable, making the summer Haj a pilgrimage of peril, even catastrophe