In a world beset by intensifying climate change mainly produced by combustion of fossil fuel, Saudi Arabia is ground zero. The firm accountable for the single largest contribution to that warming is the kingdom’s national oil company, Saudi Aramco. Oil and gas produced by Aramco is responsible for just under 5 percent of global emissions, the largest share of any single firm anywhere in the world.(1) At the same time, the kingdom’s intense summer climate faces the potential of being warmed into intolerability by century’s end.(2) Despite the implied climate damage to its homeland, Saudi Aramco is moving to expand, streamline and protect its system of oil monetization, so that the Saudi NOC can produce and market the kingdom’s prodigious below-ground reserves “for generations to come,” as its 2019 bond prospectus states. This paper investigates the policies that Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy is developing to protect its economy and political institutions from its exposure to risks around continued use of fossil fuels, and particularly the potential reduction in oil rents that threatens social welfare expenditures meant to buy public support for the regime. For Saudi Aramco, climate threats are partially offset by opportunities, given the company’s status as the producer with the world’s lowest cost basis and lowest intensity of greenhouse gas emissions per barrel produced.(3) These attributes suggest that oil from the kingdom should retain a prominent role in oil markets, particularly under climate constraints. However, Aramco’s quest to remain the “last man standing” in global oil will depend not just on its cost advantages but on continued enhancement of its carbon competitiveness. 1. Benoit Mayer and Mikko Rajavuori, “National Fossil Fuel Companies and Climate Change Mitigation under International Law,” Syracuse J. Int’l L. & Com. 44 (2016): 55. 2. Jeremy S. Pal and Elfatih A. B. Eltahir, “Future Temperature in Southwest Asia Projected to Exceed a Threshold for Human Adaptability,” Nature Clim. Change 6, no. 2 (February 2016): 197–200. 3. Garvin A Heath et al., “Global Carbon Intensity of Crude Oil Production,” Science 361, no. NREL/JA-6A20-70554 (2018).