Western Firms Find ‘Money in Exchange for Silence’ in Saudi City of Neom

A new investigation for DeSmog.

This morning DeSmog published my latest article: “‘Money in Exchange for Silence’: Behind Neom’s Green Image, Western Firms Cash in on Saudi Commitment to Oil.”

This investigation, which I started working on in January (!), reveals how dozens of Western communications and consulting agencies have earned countless millions of dollars portraying Neom—a massive development in Saudi Arabia that largely does not yet exist—as a green and sustainable city of the future designed to help humanity tackle the climate crisis.

“What is Neom?”, you ask? Well, “what is Neom?” is the name of an expensive, multi-year PR campaign that I profile in the story. But more directly, as the article explains:

“Neom” is the brainchild and flagship construction project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the ruler-in-waiting and de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. Designed hand-in-hand with elite Western consulting firms, Neom is portrayed as a futuristic, emissions-free utopia in the country’s northwest Tabuk province, which sits along the coast of the Red Sea.

Neom’s promotional efforts often consist of fanciful digital renderings of luxurious resorts and futuristic cityscapes replete with lush greenery, vibrant natural wonders, and promises of ecological and environmental preservation. “Sustainability is a very big theme in everything that we do,” Rayan Fayez, Neom’s deputy CEO, told an audience in June.

Paradoxically for a project cloaked in green branding, Neom—or at least the idea of Neom—has emerged as an important asset in the Saudi government’s campaign to preserve global demand for fossil fuels.

It is a delicate challenge to portray the world’s largest oil exporter—and a documented opponent of global climate action, particularly at UN climate talks—as a champion of sustainability.

But it is not a challenge that the Saudi government is attempting alone. DeSmog found that at least two-dozen communications firms have together earned tens of millions of dollars helping Crown Prince Mohammed and the Saudi government develop and sell the idea of Neom.¹

Selling the idea of Neom, rather than Neom itself, is an important detail—in part because, it’s worth noting again, most of Neom has not been built.²

The more fundamental point, however, is that Neom does not actually have to exist for the idea of the city to serve as a valuable distraction from the Saudi government’s human rights abuses, its ongoing civil and political repression, and its efforts to obstruct global climate negotiations.

The idea of Neom also happens to generate a lot of lucrative contracts for a lot of elite Western firms (many of which have made climate and human rights pledges of their own):

[T]he web of prestigious and influential Western companies doing business with Neom and the Saudi government is vast and deeply interconnected—and impossible to map in full. This opacity stems from a powerful combination of aggressive nondisclosure agreements, strident corporate obfuscation, and an overwhelming torrent of marketing and PR imagery that blurs the boundary between what is real, and what exists only in digital simulations and science fiction-style YouTube videos.

For both the Saudi government and its Western contractors, the distinction between the real and the imaginary appears irrelevant: The image of Neom as a sustainable city of the future is ultimately what matters.

What is inescapably real, however, is the amount of money involved, and the growing demand among autocratic oil-producers for help revamping their reputations and selling a green image to domestic audiences and throughout Western capitals.

There’s a lot more about all of this in the story, which you can read here: “‘Money in Exchange for Silence’: Behind Neom’s Green Image, Western Firms Cash in on Saudi Commitment to Oil.”

Thanks to the great people at DeSmog who supported and worked on this story, including Matthew Green, DeSmog’s global investigations editor, who waited patiently for many drafts and put many hours of his time into it.

I’m also deeply grateful to the activists, experts, researchers, and other sources who spoke with me for, and contributed to, this investigation.

1. For clarity, I’ve condensed these excerpts from the story.

2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-05/saudis-scale-back-ambition-for-1-5-trillion-desert-project-neom