Does oil-rich Saudi Arabia really want to mend its ways and go green?

WHEN I instructed folks I used to be going to Saudi Arabia to do some reporting, many assumed I used to be visiting Neom, or some variation on “that weird city in the desert”. I wasn’t. I went to report on a mission known as Deep Climate, which is researching human adaptation to excessive circumstances, such because the brutal warmth of the Arabian desert. But I came upon a lot about Neom, and a few of the different modifications afoot in Saudi Arabia, whereas I used to be at it.

I first heard about Neom intimately in 2021 at COP26, the place its govt director of vitality, Jens Madrian, …