MIRAGE

After the harsh morning sunlight, the research center was dark and cool inside. There, in front of a large monitor, an engineer clicked on a slide to begin the day’s presentation for his visitor: “Towards carbon emissions net zero,” it read.

This was not, as the slide suggested, an environmental organization or a climate conference. TIME had been allowed inside the normally secretive R&D hub of Saudi Aramco, a fossil-fuel behemoth that dwarfs giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron. Even as the world’s largest oil exporter busily pumps crude and pours it into the hulls of seafaring tankers, it is loudly proclaiming its ambitions to reach net-zero carbon emissions within its borders by 2060.

For Saudis—two-thirds of whom are younger than 35—climate change is not a far-off issue. Summer heat regularly tops 120°F. Climate scientists last year said they believed the Middle East’s temperatures could become “potentially life-threatening for humans” in the years ahead. “These countries are already facing a crisis,” says Ali al-Saffar, an analyst on the region at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “They have skin in the game.”

The Saudis are hardly blameless for global warming; environmentalists say Saudi Aramco has generated more than 4% of global greenhouse gases since 1965. Here on the edge of the Arabian Desert, Saudi Arabia has tapped an unfathomable quantity of oil—about 267 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, or about 15% of the world’s total—since the 1930s, when California wildcatters struck a gusher