Friday, December 14, 2007

Guess Who's Building a Green City?

From Der Spiegel:

In a delicious irony, Abu Dhabi is pouring oil billions into a zero-emissions metropolis in the desert.

There's a former nursery across from the royal family's private terminal at the Abu Dhabi airport. It doesn't look like much now -- 1,600 acres of sand dotted with small, forlorn trees. But one fenced-in spot on the property hints of a plan so ambitious that it stands out even in a land of seemingly limitless wealth.

There, atop concrete slabs, engineers are preparing to test solar collectors. Those collectors are scheduled to power a futuristic 100,000-resident city that will rise from this sandy wasteland by the Persian Gulf. The goal: to create the world's first metropolis that emits not a single extra molecule of carbon dioxide, the cause of global warming....MORE