This paper examines the emerging politics of environmental hazards in Oman in order to better illuminate how Omani citizens and authorities attempt to influence each other. I argue that, contrary to Oman’s typical classification as a rentier state, the government has never been autonomous from popular pressure by virtue of its capacity to purchase loyalty with its oil wealth. Since the founding of the modern Omani state in the early 1970s, authorities and dissidents alike have enacted a much broader vision of interdependence, one that purported to unlock a synergy between an administrative state and a “modern” citizenry. Indeed, the practice of rent distribution itself was established in Oman as a strategy that advertised to everyday people the benefits of this new social contract, branded as the Omani “renaissance” (al nahda). Recognizing this history of statecraft and popular pressure helps us move beyond the economic-exchange metaphors of the rentier framework to better understand political grievances and their mobilization in Oman today, as I demonstrate in the case of floods, cyclones, and industrial pollution. The first section of this paper draws from British and Omani archives to demonstrate the imperial origins of this new social contract. These archives document a shift in the mode of rule by British imperial officers in the 1960s and 1970s, largely in response to pressure from mid-twentieth century anti-imperialist movements. The second section documents how British officers carried out this new project, waging a “hearts and minds” campaign by showing off modern roads, schools, hospitals, and the like. The new Oman was to be a modern nation wherein the health, safety, and prosperity of the Omani people became the goals of statecraft. The third section of this paper draws from interviews, Omani media, and archival research to demonstrate how this new social contract helped to politicize environmental hazards in Oman. Focusing on recent attempts to mobilize grievances in the aftermath of floods, cyclones, and industrial pollution, I show how dissidents are using the spectacles that these problems create as opportunities to pressure for government reform. They are doing so by drawing upon the values ennobled by the renaissance to publicly frame such destruction as a failure of government authority.