5. Unnaturally Cool

T

he story until now has been inspirational: a Horatio Alger tale

of rags to riches on a regional scale and at breakneck pace. But

this book’s central argument is not that oil brought prosperity

to a destitute people but that those once- deprived societies have become

exceptionally wasteful, particularly with the one commodity their live-

lihoods depend on.

The Gulf monarchies did not just mutate from minor consumers into

average consumers of oil and gas. The six Gulf ruling families unwit-

tingly engaged in political practices that would lead their societies

to become some of the most energy intensive on earth. As the oil they

exported became more important as an input in their domestic econo-

mies, the political structures that kept the old families in control would

become unwieldy.

As we will explore in chapter 6, what was not apparent at the time— to

policy makers or regional scholars— was the crucial distinction bet-

ween the distribution of rents and the giving away of in- kind resources.

Over the next four decades, growth in domestic energy demand would

begin to threaten Gulf monarchies’ ability to export oil— and exportation

was and is the backbone of both the economy and the political system.

The drastic changes in demand took place not over many generations

but within the lifetimes of citizens who still inhabit these countries today.