Jim Krane

Jim Krane, Ph.D., researches and teaches energy and geopolitics at Rice University’s Baker Institute, a think-tank based in Houston.

Jim's latest book is "Energy Kingdoms" (2019), which looks at the Persian Gulf monarchies and their rise from poverty to ostentatious wealth on the back of oil. Over the years, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies became too enamored of their main export, and their consumption -- and carbon emissions -- reached world-leading levels. Now, with the world beginning to crack down on fossil fuel use, these carbon-dominated kingdoms are some of the most risk-exposed entities on Earth. "Energy Kingdoms" is receiving rave reviews, including from the journal Science, Bloomberg, the Petroleum Economist, and others.

Jim was also a longtime journalist in the Persian Gulf region who wrote a previous book about Dubai's rise, titled "City of Gold." (The book was also published under the title "Dubai: The Story of the World's Fastest City.") Jim's Dubai book received warm reviews from the Financial Times, Bloomberg News, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and the New York Review of Books, among others.

City of Gold benefits from Jim's unique insider-outsider perspective. Insider, because Jim got a rare look at the inner workings of government as a consultant in the office of Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum; Outsider because his is the first popular work with the scope and courage to examine every angle of Dubai's development - from the swish offices of the city's top policymakers to the grimy labor camps housing the underpaid men who built the city.

Before landing his PhD, Jim was a journalist for nearly 18 years. He reported from the Middle East and beyond as the Associated Press's Dubai-based Gulf correspondent from 2005-2007. Prior to that he was AP's Baghdad correspondent, covering the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion and the rise of the Iraqi insurgency in 2003 and 2004. He also reported frequently from Afghanistan during those years, and several other countries around the Middle East. Previously Jim was an AP business writer in New York, focusing on technology news, and worked at several US newspapers.

Besides writing books, Jim also pens scholarly articles for peer-reviewed journals, including Energy Policy, Energy Journal, Nature Energy and others, as well as occasional blog posts on Forbes, The Hill and Politico, newspaper op-eds.

Why a book on Dubai?

Jim arrived in Dubai in January 2005, where he found a city erupting onto the earth. Thousands of new residents streamed in each day. The entire city was a construction site, with more than 10 percent of the world's building cranes at work. Neighborhoods spread across the desert like kudzu. In the course of its six-year boom, Dubai swelled from a modest city the size of Milwaukee to a bloated megalopolis the size of Houston - doubling in population and quadrupling in area. Most incredibly, this wild growth was taking place within a short distance of the carnage in Iraq, and was receiving little notice in the United States.

Dubai, it turned out, was the antithesis of Baghdad. As fast as Iraq was being destroyed - bombed, dismantled and otherwise collapsing - Dubai was accomplishing the opposite, casting off the vestiges of primitivity and rising into magnificence.

There are few, if any, places on earth where the span of modernization is so compressed, where extreme capitalist excess is just a generation removed from Third World poverty. Here, men born in palm shacks became billionaires. Shrewd professors, holders of PhDs from American universities, had been raised by illiterate parents.

The fact that such a success story has risen in the Arab world is of great importance, both inside the region and out. With little notice, Dubai's undemocratic capitalism has become the development model for the rest of the Middle East. Like it or not, the Dubai effect has already touched your life.

But all is not well with this brash city-state. Dubai accomplished its feats on the backs of a vast labor force of mistreated men who have never received their due. The city's success has destroyed far more lives than was necessary. And its wild growth upset the demographic balance, leaving the city 95 percent foreign and nearly 80 percent male. Dubai's pampered natives are such a tiny minority that retaining their sovereignty has become a major worry. Meanwhile, prostitution has become a necessity, spawning the tragic industry of human trafficking.

And, in the years since the onset of global recession, Dubai has emerged as the poster child of the previous era's gluttonous excess. Dubai's once soaring real estate values have collapsed further than anywhere on earth, and unemployed expatriates have fled for the exits. Krane's book examines the viability of Dubai's economic model, going forward.

In short, Dubai is a fascinating topic.

Subsequent research grants include awards from the Qatar National Research Fund, the Dubai School of Government and Cambridge University.

Krane was based for more than a year in Iraq, where he covered the aftermath of the U.S. invasion and ensuing insurgency for AP. Previously, Krane was an AP Business writer in New York, responsible for technology news. He is the winner of several journalism awards, including the 2003 AP Managing Editors Deadline Reporting Award, received for his coverage of Saddam Hussein’s capture in Iraq. Krane is a member of Cambridge University’s Energy Policy Research Group, where his Ph.D. studies took place. He holds an M.Phil. in technology policy from Cambridge University’s Judge Business School and a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University.