Why Nearly All Saudi Arabians Live in These Lines

as of 2023 Saudi Arabia has a population of about 37 million people which makes it only the sixth most populated country in the Arab world behind Morocco Iraq Algeria Sudan and Egypt but the vast majority of Saudi Arabia's 37 million people today live in one of the most bizarre population patterns that you've probably ever seen about 80 percent of every resident in the country lives within just one of these two narrow straight lines one running directly along the country's West Coast by the Red Sea and the other running directly across the center of the country between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf outside of these two lines the rest of the country for the most part is basically completely empty with some of the most sparsely populated areas that can be found anywhere on the planet with a handful of notable exceptions that remain nearby to the Lions nonetheless so how do this weird situation in Saudi Arabia actually come to be first of all it's extremely important for you to understand that Saudi Arabia's territory is absolutely massive and probably a lot bigger than you think it is the country is the 12th largest just in the entire world and if you placed it sideways over Europe it would cover up nearly everything between Paris Kiev and Albania for an American context Saudi Arabia would cover this huge area stretching from New York City to Oklahoma City to Wichita and even down into Northern Florida it's a really really big area and even with 37 million people who live there now it's still a pretty sparsely populated country overall but the whole 37 million people thing there is an incredibly recent development for nearly all of human history until the late 20th century the population of the country was only a tiny fraction of what it is today because Saudi Arabia encompasses one of the least hospitable and most dangerous environments to humankind that can be found anywhere on our planet the fact that so many people live there today is purely a product of spite against nature With a Little Help from modern technology you see Saudi Arabia encompasses most of the geographic Arabian Peninsula and the interior of this peninsula is nearly completely dominated by deserts the largest of them are the technically separate unnafood deserts in the north straddling the borders with Jordan in Iraq which is connected via a narrow Corridor of sand to the rub al-kali desert which is better known in English as simply the empty quarter you can clearly see why it's called that today when simply looking at the Google or Apple map of the area which basically just shows a big mysterious empty Blank Spot on the map in the middle of Arabia without any roads or towns or infrastructure at all to be found anywhere this is because represents the single largest continuous expanse of Sam that can be found anywhere on the planet stretching over an area that is larger than the entirety of France and with Mighty Dunes that can soar to 330 meters in height during the summer the temperatures within this seemingly endless expansive sand can reach 131 degrees Fahrenheit or 55 Celsius at noon out in the open and even 112 degrees Fahrenheit or 44 Celsius even in the shade which basically only exists here if you happen to bring your own with you and then the exact opposite is true during the winter when temperatures within the empty quarter can actually get brutally cold to as low as 19 Fahrenheit or negative 7 Celsius well below freezing in a sense the empty quarter can be essentially thought of as an ocean of sand and for thousands of years right into the present day it has acted as a massive Geographic boundary and obstacles separating Central and Northern Arabia from Southern Arabia today in the 21st century it highly separates the core of Saudi Arabia's population centers from the population cores found in the United Arab Emirates Oman and Yemen which has always made trade in contact between all of them substantially more difficult than he would otherwise expect since they all border each other by land it is a part of the explanation into how a body Islam managed to become the dominant sect of the Islamic faith in Oman because oman's population Corps around Muscat is very heavily separated from the rest of the Arabian Peninsula by the ocean-like empty Corridor meaning that oman's population core more or less acted more like an island for thousands of years right up through much of the 20th century attempting a crossing of the empty Corridor was often compared with Crossing Antarctica towards the South Pole in terms of physical difficulty it wasn't even until 1931 less than a century ago that the first documented crossing of the empty Corridor was even ever made a full 20 years after the first successful expedition to the South Pole the very first road stretching across the empty Corridor wasn't even completed and opened until 2018. a road that only then connected Oman directly to Saudi Arabia for the first time in all of human history despite them sharing a land border that is 658 kilometers long up until then the only way to get from Saudi Arabia to Oman was by camel 4x4 driving for about 18 hours through the United Arab Emirates first a boat or a plane and even the day after the road has been finished very few people ever Venture far beyond it and a great deal of the empty quarter remains unexplored and mysterious to humanity with no permanent inhabitants or towns and fleetingly rare nomadic Bedouin it is truly one of the final Frontiers for the human species still remaining on our planet and then outside of the empty Corner in the on the foot are not much better lands from a human settlement perspective either Saudi Arabia is also the largest country in the world that doesn't have a single permanent River to be found anywhere within its territory and nearby Yemen Oman the United Arab Emirates Qatar train in Kuwait all don't have any rivers within any of their territories either the closest rivers that can be found in Saudi Arabia are the Jordan River running through Jordan and the Euphrates river running through a rock and at the exact same time rainfall is also extremely scarce within Saudi Arabia as well because of the country's unique topography and geographical setting you see all of the higher elevation in Saudi Arabia can be just found in the western side of the country there exists here a very narrow set of coastal plains between these mountains and hills in the East and the Red Sea in the west and they basically run continually all the way from the Gulf of Aqaba in the north down through Yemen and into the Arabian Sea in the South the hills and mountains to the east of these narrow coastal plains gradually rise in elevation the further south you go to the point where around the southern border with Yemen they begin soaring to over 2 000 meters high and then they remain that high all the way through Yemen towards the Arabian Sea consequently these big and high mountains do several different things for the overall climate of the Arabian Peninsula first of all they capture significant amounts of moisture that blow into the peninsula from the Arabian and Red Seas so these areas in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula between Yemen and Saudi Arabia experienced by far the highest levels of annual rainfall that the entire Arabian Peninsula sees moreover the Mountain's high elevation hundreds to even thousands of meters up above sea level means that the temperatures up here are a lot cooler than they are back down at sea level which means that they offer tremendous and welcome relief from the oppressively hot temperatures than most of the peninsula experiences all throughout the summer months thus the wettest and mildest climate that can be found anywhere in the whole of the Arabian Peninsula is specifically within this area of the peninsula's southwest corner straddling Yemen and Saudi Arabia while the harshest and driest environment of the peninsula is found almost immediately beyond the mountains in the center of the peninsula and in the center of Saudi Arabia thus the southwest corner of Arabia has pretty much always been the most densely populated part of the peninsula for thousands of years now and it continues to remain the most densely populated part of both Saudi Arabia and Yemen today the line that we drew for Saudi Arabia running across the western coast that runs over all of these coastal plains and mountains of course continues on down through Yemen as well and within that line in Yemen is also where the vast majority of the yemeni population live as well the mountains and the relatively moderate and wetter climate that they provide within this region is also why Yemen's population is so much more enormous than neighboring oman's population it's also part of the explanation for why the Civil War in Yemen that has been ongoing since 2014 has been so much more turbulent for Saudi Arabia than Oman despite both of them technically bordering Yemen because Saudi Arabia's most densely populated territory is immediately across the border from Yemen's most densely populated territory while oman's population core is separated from Yemen's population core by over 15 800 kilometers of nearly continuous and empty desert but despite this area being the densest part of Saudi Arabia overall the country's biggest cities are all found outside of it Jeddah Mecca and Medina all further to the north developed into big cities for very different reasons because of their historically strategic locations you see Jeddah and Mecca are located nearby each other and they are about exactly equidistant from the Mediterranean the Gulf of Aden and the Persian Gulf they're also both located just to the north of the highest elevation mountains in the Arabian Peninsula and they're due Northwest of the impassable empty quarter which meant that historic trade Caravans couldn't really easily bypass their location anywhere around the South this ultimately meant that for nearly all of human history the path of least resistance for trade routes flowing between Egypt East Africa and India were all forced into funneling through the area around Jeddah and Mecca Jetta became an important Coastal Port City but it sits on flat land at sea level where the temperatures obviously can get swelteringly hot Mecca sits about 80 kilometers further Inland and further up into the surrounding Hills at about 275 meters high up in elevation and some of the mountains around the city soar to over 1800 meters high above sea level about as high as the tallest mountains that are seen in the Appalachians in the United States which obviously offer up a tremendous amount of reprieve from the hotter temperature seen lower down in Jetta the nearby Resort city of Taif sits at an elevation of 1879 meters and the temperature is up here in the summer average in the low 80s Fahrenheit or high 20 celsius compared to the low 90s Fahrenheit or low 30 Celsius experienced just further down in Mecca and Jetta there's also an easy to Traverse pass through the mountains here the lead directly over to Medina and the close proximity of all three of these cities to Egypt was incredibly significant in the past before the invention of powered steam ships you see before ships could power themselves and when they relied more on wind or human power it was difficult for them to specifically travel northward through the Red Sea because the trade winds blow here to the South and the Gulf of Suez at the northern tip of the Red Sea is extremely narrow and Rocky so ships struggling to travel northward through it would often just wreck themselves this meant that historically it was generally far safer and easier for ships traveling from India to Egypt to sail to the Egyptian port city of El kosir instead before they reached the treacherous Gulf of Suez El cosir is located precisely to the east from where a bend in the Nile River takes it the closest it gets to the Red Sea meaning that once ships arrived in El cassir Caravans could carry their goods a relatively easier 155 kilometers Overland the Nile and then simply float their goods Downstream with the current all the way through Egypt's population centers and on into the Mediterranean and from there to pretty much anywhere else and El cassir isn't located very far away from Medina which is probably part of why Medina ended up becoming such a major city Moro over Mecca and Jeddah further south through the mountain passes are basically located directly across the Red Sea from Port Sudan which today is by far the biggest Coastal settlement that can be found anywhere on the Red Sea's Western Shoreline and that's because almost immediately from Port sedan there's a relatively easy to Traverse Valley they used to lead Traders through the East African coastal mountains directly to the capital in the largest city of Sudan Khartoum the precise location where the blue and white Niles converge to Simply become the Nile the then relatively gently flows all the way up into the Mediterranean so basically until the invention of steam ships and the development of the Suez Canal in the late 19th century virtually all trade that was being carried out between Egypt East Africa the Red Sea Persia and India were all funneled through this route with Jeddah Mecca and Medina precisely in the center of everything which is why all three became hugely important cities from an economic perspective early on in human history but when once you cross through we're over the mountain ranges here in the west of the country it's pretty much just entirely low and flat elevation all the way across the rest of Arabia clear to the Persian Gulf in the East moreover the Tropic of Cancer runs clear across the center of Arabia and very near to the Persian Gulf this is important because the closer to the Tropic of Cancer you get the stronger the subtropical Ridge effect becomes which is this large belt of high pressure running across the planet where the winds are mostly forced into being very calm this effect suppresses convection from being able to take place effectively especially during the summer months and in the Persian Gulf region this subtropical Ridge effect kills updrafts and prevents the transformation of moisture in the air being able to develop into rain meaning that instead of rain here you just get absolutely insane and sometimes even lethal levels of heat and humidity the situation is completely different across the gulf in Iran because Southern Iran has big mountains that are high enough to force air upwards and Force the moisture into rain nonetheless but the Southern Shores of the gulf in Arabia don't have any mountains and are almost entirely flat so they basically don't get any rain and are just left with all of the humidity the Persian Gulf itself is also a fairly shallow body of water all things considered with an average depth of only about 50 meters and its circulation with the rest of the ocean is fairly restricted because of the narrowness of the Strait of Hormuz at only about 39 kilometers wide which all ultimately mean that the Persian Gulf isn't very good at either absorbing a massive amount of heat because there isn't a lot of water volume to do that and it's very bad at circulating its small volume of hot water with the rest of the ocean to keep it cooler during the summer that ultimately means that the Southern Shores of the gulf get the worst of every imaginable World extremely hot temperatures with very little wind and no cooling effect from a large body of water and run away humidity without any rain which further prevents the atmosphere from being able to cool down during the night because the humidity is very high and that retains all of the heat thus the area in Arabia around the Persian Gulf suffers from literally the most oppressive combination of humidity and heat that can be found anywhere in the world and it's one of the very few places where this combination can actually reach lethal levels you see in environments that are both hot and humid it steadily becomes more and more challenging for humans to cool down their body temperatures through sweating because it is more difficult to transfer heat to warm wet air than warm dry air when the combination of heat and humidity exceeds 95 Fahrenheit or 35 Celsius and 100 humidity any human being even one who is fit and healthy will die within hours if they are out in the open and not properly clothed because their bodies will no longer be capable of shedding any of their heat and they will only be gaining heat instead until death since 2005 there have been at least nine recorded instances of this exact scenario developing around the Persian Gulf in Arabia during the summer so for virtually all of human history then this vast part of Arabia on the other side of the Red Sea coastal mountains was virtually uninhabitable extremely sparsely populated underdeveloped and devoid of most human life saved for the occasional band of Nomads small Oasis towns in the interior like what eventually became Riyadh or founded but they remained tiny Rural and enormously isolated from the rest of the world for thousands of years virtually everyone across most of Arabia lived a nomadic lifestyle right up into the mid 20th century and at the turn of the 20th century all of Saudi Arabia's current land mass probably only had around 2 million people living within it and nearly all of them lived just in the extreme west of the country along the narrow Red Sea coastal plains within the first line of Saudi Arabia's population pattern the second line of Saudi Arabia's modern population Corps running across the center of the country through lands that were basically uninhabitable Wasteland for all of human history only came into existence in the latter half of the 20th century for a couple of very big reasons the first is because Riyadh was historically The ancestral seat of the House of sod who through a series of conquests across the early 20th century managed to carve out the modern state of Saudi Arabia as we know it today when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was first proclaimed in 1932 the saads made Riyadh the new Kingdom's Capital not only because it was their own ancestral home and Seed but because there were very few other Alternatives at time in 1932 Riyad was nothing but a small town home to only about 27 000 people Mecca was probably the biggest city in the country back then with a population of around 80 000 but neither Mecca nor Medina could possibly be selected as the new Kingdom's Capital because of their prohibitions on non-muslims who are forbidden from ever being able to enter either of the two holy cities which would be a big problem for hosting foreign diplomats in either of them from non-muslim countries Riyadh was more centrally located within the middle of the country as well and so Riyadh was selected to be the new country's capital it was very fortunate that shortly after that decision in 1938 the largest oil fields in the entire world were discovered just to the east of Riyadh near to the Persian Gulf after those oil fields were developed and after the price of oil quadrupled following the 1973 oil crisis Riyadh flourished owing to its proximity to the fields and new cities and urban areas in the east of Saudi Arabia right on top of the fields exploded in in population as the demand for jobs there skyrocketed out of nowhere the modern city of damam here was only first settled by humans in 1923 and it was the location of the first oil discovered in Saudi Arabia a decade and a half later in 1938. it eventually became the core of the entire state-owned Saudi Oil Business and grew from being completely uninhabited in 1923 to a big Urban metropolitan area of around 2.2 million people today only a century later competing with Las Vegas and Nevada for the title of the biggest city in the world that was only settled in the 20th century indeed Saudi Arabia large utterly exploded in population as well from the oil business came flooding into the kingdom after 1973 and the kingdom used the money to become one of the largest welfare states in the world for all of its citizens no personal income tax was levied on anyone while Healthcare housing fuel electricity water and food were all massive heavily subsidized by the government for everyone because there was just so much money coming in from oil but the Saudi citizens themselves were far too few in number to assume all of the necessary jobs that were being created and in this environment where nearly all of their needs were being met by the government many of them didn't necessarily see the point in working out a job a labor shortage grew immediately apparent within the kingdom as soon as the 1950s and to help overcome it the kingdom began a process of mass importation of so-called guest workers from abroad into the country millions of foreign laborers began coming to the kingdom to fill the more menial jobs being created in privately owned Industries like construction and services that Saudi citizens themselves mostly didn't want to take and the overwhelming majority of them were Muslims from countries like India Pakistan Bangladesh the Philippines Indonesia Myanmar and Egypt they were never given any possible Pathway to gaining Saudi citizenship and not even their children born within Saudi Arabia would ever be granted citizenship either and in many cases guest workers would have their past reports confiscated upon arrival to the kingdom and essentially held hostage and coerced into labor this effectively led to the creation of a two-tiered labor system operating within the kingdom wherein the government and the public sector is viewed as more prestigious easier and higher paid and filled with more than 70 percent Saudi citizens but the private sector is considered less desirable more menial and lower paid and filled with as many as 90 percent non-saudi foreigners who According to some human rights organizations are effectively treated as borderline slaves slavery was only officially outlawed within the Saudi Kingdom in 1962 though it sort of continues to this day in this new way it has gotten to the point where today for every two Saudi citizens within the kingdom there is one foreign laborer but when it comes to the actual workers in the country the ratios are completely reversed there were about four and a half million Saudi citizens currently employed mostly by the Saudi government and over 8 million foreign workers who are mostly employed within the private sector meaning there are nearly two foreign workers in the country for every one Saudi citizen worker as of 2023 it's estimated that roughly 36 percent of the Kingdom's total overall population are non-citizen foreigners born outside of the Kingdom nearly twice the ratio of foreigners currently present within the United States and the vast vast majority of them in Saudi Arabia are the very low paid guest workers from developing countries it's estimated that there's only about a hundred thousand westerners Who currently live in the kingdom and they are treated vastly superior but because of all these factors combined Saudi Arabia literally became the fastest urbanizing and the fastest developing society that has ever been witnessed in all of human history in 1950 shortly after World War II the entire Saudi population was estimated to only be around 3.1 million people fewer than 30 percent of them lived in cities the vast majority of the population remained nomadic and Riyadh remained an isolated in quiet town with only 83 000 people while Jeddah and Mecca each only had a tad more than a hundred thousand over only the 70 years of history that have taken place since then enough for a single lifetime to have witnessed the population of the Kingdom has exploded by nearly 12 times over to around 37 million people today Riyadh and Jeddah have each transformed from Mere Villages and towns into massive globally important metropolises with populations of 7.7 million and 5.3 million people respectively now more than 85 percent of the country lives in cities having gone from about as Urban as Burkina Faso to about as Urban as Finland all within a single Lifetime and as a result this is why the population pattern of Saudi Arabia ended up evolving into the way it appears today with the overwhelming majority of the population living within just these two lines the historic Line running along the country's West Coast Which is far more naturally habitable than anywhere else in Arabia and the new line running across the country's Center which is completely artificially created in a very recent development only made possible through enormously expensive engineering efforts paid for by the Kingdom's lucrative oil business but 37 million people living within Saudi Arabia today is extremely problematic for a whole bunch of reasons it's likely not going to be very sustainable for the long term because there are obviously a ton of problems created by Saudi Arabia's currently massive population in one of the least hospitable environments on the planet first of all water access As Cities like Riyadh and damam grew into metropolises with millions of people in an area without any rivers and without any rainfall they quickly began hitting water supply issues Saudi aramco the state-owned oil giant used to searching for underground oil and gas deposits was tasked with searching for underground water deposits as well and they found a lot of them once upon a time as recently as the 1970s these underground water aquifers they found within the kingdom contained enough freshwater volume to fill up the entirety of Lake Erie between the United States and Canada but the problem with them is that with rare to non-existent rainfall these aquifers were all non-renewable and they could never possibly be replenished on a human timeline and as the kingdom continued developing and growing in population their needs for food increased alongside their needs for water but Saudi Arabia has hardly any ability to grow any of their own food as only about one and a half percent of their land is actually considered to be arable that means that despite being the world's 12th largest country by total amount of land the amount of land within the kingdom that's actually considered suitable for agriculture is about as much as shakia possesses the world's 115th largest country only home to fewer than 11 million people so once Saudi Arabia's population started getting into the tens of millions there was simply no possible way that the kingdom could ever create enough food for all of its residents all on its own which meant that it either had to begin importing large amounts of food from abroad or artificially create new farmlands within the kingdom through irrigation and so not wishing to become overly dependent on Imports of food coming in from abroad the Saudi government chose the second option the state began to heavily subsidize the price of water to Farmers all across the kingdom with all of their oil revenues and so the farmer set about creating their so-called miracles in the desert green crop circles producing crops and livestock in the middle of one of Earth's most harshest deserts the relatively affordable prices of these Miracles were only made possible by the government's heavy subsidization of the water which was expensive to the government but it was cheap for the farmers and consumers who treated the cheap water fairly carelessly like any other cheap resource the process was abhorrently inefficient and all of the water that the farmers were using were coming from the country's limited and irreplaceable fossil aquifers by the 2010s it was already fear that about four-fifths of the kingdoms unreplenishable water aquifers had already been depleted and it was further feared that they would run completely dry altogether by only the 2030s recognizing this the government began Banning the production of certain water thirsty crops within the kingdom like wheat in 2016. subsidies for water were relaxed or ended all together and the Intensive inefficient farming practices in the desert finally began to end instead the kingdom began using the vast resources and its oil generated Sovereign wealth fund to buy up agricultural land in other countries abroad that were more suitable to farming where crops will be grown and harvested and exported back to the kingdom but the Great Water problem that this all left over for the kingdom has been profound now without any rivers hardly any rainfall and vastly depleted aquifers teetering on the brink of empty the kingdom had little other possible ability to get water to Big growing and thirsty cities in the East like Riyadh and dhamma the only solution really was to build out what was nothing less than the large just desalination operation the world has ever known once again paid for by the Kingdom's oil revenues at least 17 desalination plants have been constructed across the Persian Gulf in the Red Sea coastlines of Saudi Arabia to date to convert the ocean's salt water into drinkable fresh water and even more being planned and built all the time to further accommodate the growing and thirsty population it's currently basically the only way that the Kingdom's biggest city Riyadh gets any water now at all a vast series of pipelines stretching for 467 kilometers across the empty and harsh deserts connect the many desalination plans on the Persian Gulf with a capital city and it's 7.7 million residents providing them now with virtually all of their drinking water supply it's all gotten to the point today where approximately 50 percent of Saudi Arabia's entire water supply all comes just from desalination 40 percent continues to come from the mining of non-renewable groundwater sources that are quickly becoming depleted and expected to be gone all together by sometime next decade in the 2030s while only 10 percent actually comes from renewable surface water in the mountains in the southwest of the country the only place that was historically actually habitable here at some point by the 2030s then it can be expected that once the groundwater Supply completely runs dry desalination will have to reach a point where it is providing at least 90 percent or even more of the Kingdom's total water supply which is increasingly becoming problematic because desalination is both outrageously inefficient and extremely energy intensive and not to even mention horrendously polluting these are especially bad for Saudi Arabia because the kingdom produces nearly all of their energy and electricity through oil and gas as of 2020 a whopping 62 percent of all the energy consumed within the country came just from oil and a further 38 percent all from natural gas with virtually zero Renewables usage at all as far as electricity generation goes the Saudis again as of 2020 produced 61 of it with natural gas 39 of it with oil and only 0.3 percent of it was solar with no other methods being employed at all Saudi Arabia has never really bothered with energy diversification until now because why would they have they had the biggest easiest and cheapest to access oil and gas fields in the entire world just sitting there but the problem is that if Saudi Arabia's energy and electricity needs have grown as the population has grown and gotten more developed it's eating more and more into the state's potential budget and coffers because Saudi Arabia earns nearly all of their government's budget through selling their oil and gas to customers abroad and the more of that oil and gas that gets consumed domestically the less they have available to export and sell abroad and the less budget they have to work with and the more unstable the country can become as they need to compensate for that by raising taxes that the people aren't used to or cutting down on welfare programs that the people are used to or by cutting down on defense spending that the state needs in order to survive against its many any enemies and external geopolitical threats it's already estimated that some 25 percent of Saudi Arabia's total domestic oil and gas consumption is simply directed towards firing up power plants to provide the electricity needed to keep the desalination plants pumping to generate water and it's estimated that by 2030 it may increase up to as much as 50 percent of the Kingdom's oil and gas consumption all being dedicated solely to the desalination plants essentially meaning that the kingdom is simply converting large amounts of its oil into large amounts of water but that's far from the only thing the Saudis are sacrificing a lot of their oil and gas for water gasoline and electricity are all provided to the citizens of Saudi Arabia at fractions of a price that are seen in other developed countries as a part of the Kingdom's great welfare bargain with the people prior to 2012 gasoline was even cheaper within the kingdom than water at about 50 cents a gallon and it remains at an average of only about 2.35 cents a gallon compared to three dollar and 90 cents in the United States and 7.35 cents in the United Kingdom at the same time a kilowatt hour of electricity in Saudi Arabia currently only costs an average of 5 cents compared to 17 cents in the United States and 50 cents in the United Kingdom meaning that electricity is only about a third of the price in the United States right now and only about a tenth of the price in the United Kingdom that ultimately means that there's never really been any major barrier to entry in the Kingdom to just buy as massive and gas guzzling of an SUVs you can possibly get your hands on and then drive it as hard and as aggressively as you want with no regard for fuel economy whatsoever all while you simultaneously keep your air conditioning on at full blast at home even when you're away for days or weeks at a time the Kingdom's desalination plants May consume around 20 percent of the country's entire electricity production but air conditioning across the swelteringly hot Kingdom consumes a whopping 70 percent of the total electricity production desalination and air conditioning alone consume around 90 percent of all the electricity in the country and nearly all of the electricity is produced by burning oil and gas not to mention all of the oil burned on all of the massive SUVs and trucks in the kingdom and the need for more desalination plants to consume even more oil and gas is continuing to grow consequently roughly a fourth of all the oil that gets produced in Saudi Arabia is simply burned and consumed domestically for pennies on the dollar before it even has the chance to be exported and that ratio is increasing all of the time Saudi Arabia is currently already the fourth largest consumer of oil in the world and they consume more oil than Germany and France do combined despite only having about a fourth of the population is both of them and only about a seventh of the size of their combined economies burning through this much oil is already burning through a massive amount of the government's potential budget and it's increasing all the time as the population continues to grow and the demand for desalinated water electricity and vehicles continues to grow as well now in order to avoid the spiral of Doom the Saudis are attempting to radically diversify their economy away from oil as quickly as possible brand new Industries like tourism technology and entertainment are all being encouraged and developed to diversify government revenue sources away from oil and they're being combined with new solar and wind programs and potentially even nuclear programs to diversify their energy and electricity sources away from oil and gas so they can continue selling more of it abroad the kingdom is currently shooting to increase the share of Renewables and their overall power generation from about zero percent today to 7 by 2030. then more from there but the end result is that ultimately Saudi Arabia in its current form is probably the most artificial and man-made civilization that has ever existed on the face of the Earth and any number of things could potentially go wrong with all of it the Kingdom's enormous over-reliance on desalination as a water source will be surrounded by powerful enemies who openly want to overthrow their monarchy is an extremely acute geopolitical vulnerability destroy only a few of the desalination facilities and millions within the kingdom will be left without any water the fact that Saudi Arabia's political core around Riyadh is extremely empty and sparsely populated but the Kingdom's Borderlands are much more heavily populated near Yemen the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and are often more populated with religious minorities has forced the Saudi State into adopting an aggressive foreign policy doubly so in the Kingdom's oil fields are primarily located in one of these Borderland regions populated by a religious minority group with potential affinities to Iran the Kingdom's primary source of Revenue exporting oil abroad on tanker ships can be easily constrained by a hostile foreign power in the numerous tight waterways and choke points that surround it which necessitates a high military budget to protect against in a relationship with an outside security guarantor like the United States and the kingdom knows that as oil grows less important to the world economy at large and their own economy adapts to solar wind and nuclear power a day will eventually come when the United States will no longer be interested at all in coming to defend the Kingdom's wind farms and solar panels Saudi Arabia needs to completely and radically transform itself even further if it is to ever survive the 21st century and if it does not and it fails then 37 million people and probably more in the future will suddenly find that they cannot actually survive in an over-engineered Wasteland that has been completely inhospitable to human life for Millennia and most of them will all have to go somewhere else now the most habitable part of the Arabian Peninsula down in the southwest corner where it actually rains and where there's actually water has long been the population core of the entire Peninsula and it used to be the economic core of the peninsula as well until the discovery of oil in the 20th century that shifted it over towards the Persian Gulf instead it's also the very first location where coffee plants imported from nearby Ethiopia were actually cultivated sometime in the late 15th century leading to the development of roasted coffee beans and the modern coffee beverage that we know today within the strictly Islamic Society of the time where alcoholic consumption was completely forbidden coffee quickly became the preferred beverage of choice instead and it was from these hills and mountains around Yemen where coffee then spread across the rest of the world from the yemeni port of mocha which lent its name to Modern mocha coffee over the centuries ever since then coffee has grown from its small origin in the hills of Yemen to become literally the most popular beverage consumed all across the world today and you can even get fresh coffee delivered straight to your door now with today's sponsor Trade coffee trade as a coffee subscription service that partners with over 55 of the country's top Indie Roasters to help you brew Cafe quality coffee at home and all of their coffee they ship to you will always be sent within only 48 Hours of being roasted so you always get the freshest coffee possible and it's also so ridiculously easy to use scheduling your delivery is easy with highly customizable Plans free shipping and anytime cancellation and it's also so much fun learning about all the cool Roasters that you can order from I personally always enjoy drinking coffee while I'm working and doing stuff so I ordered myself a bag of party wave from Tahoe's own drink coffee do stuff which was super flavorful and perfectly deserving of its name so if you want to upgrade your own morning routine with better coffee you can make yourself at home trade is offering every real life lore viewer a completely free bag of coffee with any subscription you want to sign up for at drinktrade.com real life lore the link is also Down Below in the description and when you get one there you'll also be greatly helping to support the channel while you're at it and as always thank you so much for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

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Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: uz88EurZdrI

Length: 37min 46sec (2266 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023