The geopolitical stage is less of a grand theater and more of a dimly lit bus station where everyone is trying to pick each other's pockets while pretending they’re waiting for a miracle. India, tired of standing in the rain waiting for the American bus that never seems to leave the depot, has hopped into a gold-plated limousine with the United Arab Emirates. The $3 billion deal for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) isn’t just a transaction; it’s a scathing indictment of the notion that 'shared values' can keep a billion people from revolting when the power grid flickers. ADNOC, the corporate arm of the Emirati state, has announced with all the humility of a lottery winner that India is now its largest customer, set to swallow twenty percent of its sales by 2029. It’s a match made in carbon-heavy heaven: one country with a desperate need to burn things to stay relevant, and another with an endless supply of prehistoric juice and zero interest in your domestic human rights record.

The United States, meanwhile, remains the protagonist of its own tragicomedy. A deal with the Americans remains 'elusive,' which is diplomatic-speak for 'we spent six months arguing over a semicolon and three years debating if selling gas to India violates a suburban soccer mom’s sense of climate justice.' Washington’s inability to close a deal is almost impressive in its consistency. They offer 'strategic partnerships' that come with more strings than a cheap marionette, while the UAE offers a pipe and a bill. India, having looked at both options, has decided that it prefers the people who actually deliver the product rather than the ones who deliver a lecture on democratic norms before failing to pass their own infrastructure bills. It’s a cynical pivot, sure, but in a world where the air is forty percent irony and sixty percent smog, cynicism is the only renewable resource we have left. The Americans are so busy being performatively paralyzed by their own bureaucracy that they’ve managed to lose the pole position in the race to provide the very fuels they claim to be phasing out. It’s a masterclass in incompetence that would be funny if it weren’t so pathetically predictable.

The UAE, for its part, is playing the game with the kind of ruthless efficiency that only an absolute monarchy can manage. There are no pesky congressional hearings in Abu Dhabi, no environmental impact lawsuits that take a decade to resolve, and certainly no hand-wringing over the long-term viability of the Holocene. There is only the ledger. They see a massive market in India, and they are moving to occupy it with the speed of a desert hawk. By securing twenty percent of their sales with a single customer, they aren’t just selling gas; they are buying influence. They are ensuring that as the world supposedly 'transitions' to green energy, India will be firmly tethered to the Emirati gas tap for the next decade and beyond. It’s a brilliant strategy for a world that loves to talk about the future while being pathologically addicted to the past.

And then there’s the vow to 'double trade.' If words were worth anything, we’d have solved the energy crisis decades ago. But in the mouths of politicians, a 'vow' is merely a placeholder for 'we’ll figure it out later if the polls look bad.' They promise a future of mutual prosperity, which is shorthand for 'our billionaires will play golf with your billionaires while the rest of you fight over the last bottle of water.' It’s the same script, just translated into different languages and signed with more expensive pens. The idea that doubling trade—which inevitably means more shipping, more plastic, more waste, and more carbon—is a 'win' for anyone other than the shipping magnates and the oil barons is a delusion of the highest order. But in the current intellectual vacuum of global leadership, we celebrate these numbers as if they represent actual progress rather than just a faster rate of consumption.

Let’s look at the 'Green' lie that invariably haunts these agreements. Every one of these summits involves a frantic attempt to rebrand fossil fuels as 'bridge energies' or 'transitional assets.' It’s the same linguistic gymnastics used to call a retreat a 'strategic realignment.' We are currently building a bridge to nowhere, and we’re paying $3 billion for the privilege of the first few miles. The hypocrisy is so thick you could bottle it and sell it as a premium lubricant for the gears of global commerce. India knows the West is a collection of decaying empires masking their decline with moral grandstanding, so they’re looking East and South, toward the money. When your choices are a lecture from a failing superpower or a steady supply of gas from an absolute monarchy, the gas wins every time. It’s a cold, hard world, and the only thing colder than the LNG being shipped across the ocean is the realization that this is as good as it gets. We are a species that has successfully figured out how to liquefy the prehistoric past to incinerate the immediate future, and we’re doing it with a smile and a handshake. Bravo to all involved; you’ve successfully ensured the lights stay on just long enough for us to watch the end of the world in high definition.