President Biden is in the kingdom this week to strengthen ties. Meanwhile, a U.S.-Saudi joint venture on the Texas coast is pumping out toxic chemicals.
Iโm not someone who wears the American flag on his lapel or clips an American flag to the window frame on my car. Iโm an American, because I live here, not because I wear red, white and blue and get teary eyed when someone sings the Star Spangled Banner. But ever since we learned the truth about 9/11, and have been informed about the perversity of Saudi Arabia and its ruling family, Iโve been offended by the degree to which American lips seek out Saudi ass. Itโs all tied into the fossil fuel industry, but the degree to which it makes the US look like a whore is repulsive. And now this......the Saudis do plastic, which is the latest destructive force on Earth. And what do we do? Not much.
Excerpt from this story from Grist:
The flares started last December, an event Errol Summerlin, a former legal-aid lawyer, and his neighbors had been bracing for since 2017. After the flames, nipping at the night sky like lashes from a heavenly monster, came the odor, a gnarled concoction of steamed laundry, and burned tires.
Thus did the Saudi royal family mark the expansion of its far-flung petrochemical empire to San Patricio County, Texas, a once-rural stretch of flatlands across Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi. It arrived in the form of Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, or GCGV, a plant that sprawls over 16 acres between the towns of Portland and Gregory. The complex contains a circuit board of pipes and steel tanks that cough out steam, flames, and toxic substances as it creates the building blocks for plastic from natural gas liquids.
The plant is the first joint venture in the Americas between Saudi Basic Industries Corp., or SABIC, a chemical manufacturing giant tied to one of the worldโs richest royal families, and Exxon Mobil, Americaโs biggest energy company. Exxon Mobil built its wealth on drilling for and refining oil, SABIC by making petrochemicals. As climate concerns lead to a slow but steady decline in the demand for oil, the companiesโ collaboration represents a shift by the fossil fuel industry. Rather than transforming the fossilized remains of organisms into gasoline and other motor fuels, the Texas plant breaks apart the molecular structure of oil, through a process called cracking, which turns it into the primary ingredient for car seats, single-use plastic bags, plastic coffee cups, and much more.
SABIC is a $40 billion company that manufactures chemicals, fertilizers, and plastics and is owned by Aramco, the worldโs largest oil company. In May, Aramco became the worldโs most valuable company โ generating tens of billions of dollars in profits yearly to the Saudi royal family and its kingdom.
How the Saudi royals leveraged their way into American plastic is an indicator of the blurring between state and family that has long characterized the kingdom.
