In this paper, we explore the culture of empire and imperial citizenship production within spaces of higher education in the Gulf aimed at the oil and gas industry. We focus particularly on how environmentalism and sustainability, as a now commonplace marker of the US university’s liberal branding, travels and circulates within these institutions. In the broader environmental movement, US universities are regularly depicted as sites of progressive green action, cutting-edge research, and student-driven change for divestment from fossil fuels. US universities have even been exported over the past two decades to wealthy oil- and gas-dependent states in the Arabian Peninsula under the guise of developing these societies away from fossil fuels. These countries, however, have been built and managed in order to uphold the prosperity of the West through fossil fuel extraction, while also remaining outside of the scope of Western development of liberal democratic ideologies and institutions, of which higher education has played a central part. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research within U.S. branch campuses in Qatar, and specifically on Texas A&M, a land grant university with ties to both the US military and to oil economies in the Gulf of Mexico and the Arabian Peninsula, we trace how these projects, increasingly touting green agendas for climate action, are fundamentally underpinned by, and reproduce, the operations of the fossil fuel industry. We argue that liberal knowledge and subjects produced in these educational spaces, rather than assisting to move Gulf economies away from oil dependence, reinforce the clientalist relationships between the Gulf and the United States. Bringing this research in conversation with critical university studies, we argue that US universities are embedded in a broader agenda to reconcile the climate crisis with a supposedly greener capitalism that extends fossil fuel extraction into the future. It is through following US universities as they set up campuses in Qatar that the roles of these institutions in furthering both US imperialism and climate injustice are revealed.