http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jan/21/climatechange.energy
Desert state channels oil wealth into world's first sustainable city
Lord Foster designs car-free, solar-powered project for 50,000 people
John Vidal in Abu Dhabi
The Guardian, Monday January 21 2008
In an expanse of grey rock and dust in one of the harshest environments on earth, the United Arab Emirates is about to build what is being described as the world's first sustainable city, designed by British architect Lord Foster.
The site is far from promising. Miles from a polluted sea, a fierce sun raises temperatures to 50C (120F) in the summer, and there is no fresh water, no soil and no animals. But tens of billions of petro-dollars will be poured into these seven square kilometres of desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.
Called Masdar - "the source" in Arabic - the walled city is intended to house 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses. It will have no cars and be self-sufficient in renewable energy, the majority of which will be solar energy.
The formal unveiling of the desert eco-city will be made today at a summit on future energy sources in Abu Dhabi, attended by the UK business secretary, John Hutton, and Prince Andrew.
"It's extremely ambitious," said Gerard Evenden, senior partner in Lord Foster's architecture practice in London, which has had a team working on the design for nine months. "We were invited to design a zero-carbon city. In this harsh place we needed to look back at history and see how ancient settlements had adapted to their environments." The buildings will huddle together as in a casbah, and will be cooled by wind towers which will collect the desert's breezes and flush out hot air. No building will be more than five storeys high; the city is to be oriented north-east to south-west to give the optimum balance of sunlight and shade.
It will feel closer to many cities built in the age of the cart and horse. Most roads will only be 3 metres (10ft) wide and just 70 metres long to develop a micro-climate and keep the air moving; roofs will allow in air and keep the sun out in the summer. No one will be more than 200 metres from public transport, and streets will give on to colonnaded squares and fountains.
"We are definitely not imposing a standard international architecture in Masdar. We are aiming to find a balance of light and heat," said Evenden. "It's only really hot for three months of the year, but at other times it's humid."
It is every architect's dream to build a new city and Foster's team say they started from scratch. The idea has been to reduce the amount of energy needed to build it and to live there, and then to let solar energy take over.
"We will start with a large solar power station which will provide the energy to construct the city. Some 80% of all the roof space will be used to generate solar power, and because we expect technology to improve as we are building it, we hope we will later be able to remove the power plant. We could 'borrow' energy from outside, but we are trying to prove it can all be generated in the confines of the site," said Evenden.
The architects are also planning some hi-tech gadgetry. The 50,000 inhabitants, and everyone who works there, will move around on one of three levels. A light railway will whizz people to and from Masdar to Abu Dhabi's forest of glass and steel towers; a second level is reserved for pedestrians; and a third for "personalised rapid transport pods," described by Evenden as "little vehicles like driverless personal taxis which run on tracks or magnetic discs in the road. It's a tried technology. They are in production in Holland, and used to move containers around in Rotterdam port," he said.
No clues have been given about the city's cost, how it will be socially organised and who will live there, but money is clearly no object. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the Emirates, is vying with neighbour Dubai to be the most dazzling Gulf city and the environment is seen as the new card in the deck.
With at least $1trillion (£500bn) invested abroad and sitting on nearly 100bn barrels of oil, Abu Dhabi is the richest city in the world. Its 420,000 inhabitants are theoretically worth about $17m each, and they are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than any other population in the world.
This week Abu Dhabi is expected to announce a $500m deal to manufacture thin-film solar panels to make Masdar a centre of the global solar energy manufacturing industry.
"This will be the global capital of the renewable energy revolution. It's the first oil producing nation to have taken such a significant step towards sustainable living," said Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, director of WWF's One Planet Living initiative, which aims to develop sustainable communities. But critics said Masdar is a fig leaf for the rest of the Gulf, heartland of the world's fossil fuel extraction.
"The numbers must be put into perspective. They are spending welcome billions of dollars on renewables but trillions are still going into climate-changing oil economies. The future is the sun and renewables but there is no time to wait for this revolution," said Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth.
How will it work?
Zero carbon 100% of energy supplied by renewables - photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, wind, waste-to-energy and other technologies
Zero waste 99% diversion of waste from landfill, reuse of waste, composting
Sustainable transport Zero emissions from transport in the city
Building As much as possible using recycled or certified materials
Water Per capita consumption to be 50% less than average. All waste water to be reused. Drinking water to be desalinated with solar energy
Equity and fair trade Fair wages for all workers who are employed to build the city
Showing posts with label Abu Dhabi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abu Dhabi. Show all posts
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Sacrificing Bhutto to prop up Musharraf?
http://www.suntimes.com/news/novak/719606,CST-EDT-NOVAK31.article
Sacrificing Bhutto to prop up Musharraf?
December 31, 2007
BY ROBERT NOVAK
Sun-Times Columnist
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto followed urgent pleas to the State Department for the last two months by her representatives for better security protection. The U.S. reaction was that she was worried over nothing, expressing assurance that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would not let anything happen to her.
That attitude led Bhutto's agent to inform a high-ranking State Department official that her camp no longer viewed the backstage U.S. effort to broker power sharing between Musharraf and former Prime Minister Bhutto as a good-faith effort toward democracy. It was, according to the written complaint, an attempt to preserve the politically endangered Musharraf as President Bush's man in Islamabad.
Bush confirmed that judgment Thursday when he urged that the Jan. 8 election be held in furtherance of Pakistani ''democracy.'' That may be Musharraf's position, but it definitely is not that of his critics. They say an election would be a sham with Bhutto dead, no successor named to head her Pakistan People's Party, and Saudi-backed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif boycotting the balloting.
The Bush administration months ago decided to broker power sharing with the deeply unpopular Musharraf and the popular Bhutto. That decision was based on Pakistan's strategic importance as a sanctuary for al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. Bush was in a quandary. Bhutto was much tougher than Musharraf on Islamist extremists, but Bush had heavily invested in Musharraf.
When I last saw Bhutto in August in Manhattan, she was deeply concerned about U.S. ambivalence but asked me not to write about it. She had not heard from Musharraf for three weeks after their secret July meeting in Abu Dhabi. She feared the Pakistani strongman was not being prodded from Washington.
Next came Musharraf's state of emergency and purge of Pakistan's Supreme Court to guarantee legality of his questionable election as president. According to Bhutto's advisers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Bhutto to go along with that process in return for concessions from Musharraf. Bhutto agreed but got nothing in return.
The unsuccessful Oct. 18 attempt on Bhutto's life followed the regime's rejection of her requested security protection when she returned from eight years in exile. The Pakistani government vetoed FBI assistance in investigating the attack. On Oct. 26, Bhutto sent an e-mail to Mark Siegel, her friend and Washington spokesman, to be made public only in the event of her death.
''I would hold Musharraf responsible,'' Bhutto said. ''I have been made to feel insecure by his minions.'' She listed obstruction to her ''taking private cars or using tinted windows,'' using jammers against roadside bombs and being surrounded by police cars. ''Without him [Musharraf],'' she said, those requests could not have been blocked.
In early December, a former Pakistani official supporting Bhutto visited a senior U.S. government official to renew her security requests. He got a brush-off, a mind-set reflected Dec. 6 in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, was asked to respond to fears by nonpartisan American observers of a rigged election. His reply: ''I do think they can have a good election. They can have a credible election. They can have a transparent and a fair election. It's not going to be a perfect election.'' Boucher's words echoed through corridors of power in Islamabad. The Americans' not demanding perfection signaled they would settle for less. Without Benazir Bhutto around, it is apt to be a lot less.
A more sinister fallout of a free hand from Washington for Pakistan might be Bhutto's murder. Neither her shooting last Thursday nor the attempt on her life Oct. 18 bore the classic al-Qaida trademark. After the carnage, government trucks used streams of water to clean up the blood and in the process destroy forensic evidence. If not too late, would an investigation by the FBI still be in order?
Musharraf's critics say an election would be a sham with Bhutto dead.
Sacrificing Bhutto to prop up Musharraf?
December 31, 2007
BY ROBERT NOVAK
Sun-Times Columnist
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto followed urgent pleas to the State Department for the last two months by her representatives for better security protection. The U.S. reaction was that she was worried over nothing, expressing assurance that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would not let anything happen to her.
That attitude led Bhutto's agent to inform a high-ranking State Department official that her camp no longer viewed the backstage U.S. effort to broker power sharing between Musharraf and former Prime Minister Bhutto as a good-faith effort toward democracy. It was, according to the written complaint, an attempt to preserve the politically endangered Musharraf as President Bush's man in Islamabad.
Bush confirmed that judgment Thursday when he urged that the Jan. 8 election be held in furtherance of Pakistani ''democracy.'' That may be Musharraf's position, but it definitely is not that of his critics. They say an election would be a sham with Bhutto dead, no successor named to head her Pakistan People's Party, and Saudi-backed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif boycotting the balloting.
The Bush administration months ago decided to broker power sharing with the deeply unpopular Musharraf and the popular Bhutto. That decision was based on Pakistan's strategic importance as a sanctuary for al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. Bush was in a quandary. Bhutto was much tougher than Musharraf on Islamist extremists, but Bush had heavily invested in Musharraf.
When I last saw Bhutto in August in Manhattan, she was deeply concerned about U.S. ambivalence but asked me not to write about it. She had not heard from Musharraf for three weeks after their secret July meeting in Abu Dhabi. She feared the Pakistani strongman was not being prodded from Washington.
Next came Musharraf's state of emergency and purge of Pakistan's Supreme Court to guarantee legality of his questionable election as president. According to Bhutto's advisers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Bhutto to go along with that process in return for concessions from Musharraf. Bhutto agreed but got nothing in return.
The unsuccessful Oct. 18 attempt on Bhutto's life followed the regime's rejection of her requested security protection when she returned from eight years in exile. The Pakistani government vetoed FBI assistance in investigating the attack. On Oct. 26, Bhutto sent an e-mail to Mark Siegel, her friend and Washington spokesman, to be made public only in the event of her death.
''I would hold Musharraf responsible,'' Bhutto said. ''I have been made to feel insecure by his minions.'' She listed obstruction to her ''taking private cars or using tinted windows,'' using jammers against roadside bombs and being surrounded by police cars. ''Without him [Musharraf],'' she said, those requests could not have been blocked.
In early December, a former Pakistani official supporting Bhutto visited a senior U.S. government official to renew her security requests. He got a brush-off, a mind-set reflected Dec. 6 in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, was asked to respond to fears by nonpartisan American observers of a rigged election. His reply: ''I do think they can have a good election. They can have a credible election. They can have a transparent and a fair election. It's not going to be a perfect election.'' Boucher's words echoed through corridors of power in Islamabad. The Americans' not demanding perfection signaled they would settle for less. Without Benazir Bhutto around, it is apt to be a lot less.
A more sinister fallout of a free hand from Washington for Pakistan might be Bhutto's murder. Neither her shooting last Thursday nor the attempt on her life Oct. 18 bore the classic al-Qaida trademark. After the carnage, government trucks used streams of water to clean up the blood and in the process destroy forensic evidence. If not too late, would an investigation by the FBI still be in order?
Musharraf's critics say an election would be a sham with Bhutto dead.
Friday, November 9, 2007
Abu Dhabi begins work on Ferrari theme park
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071103/lf_afp/uaeitalyautoferrarileisure_071103181816
Abu Dhabi begins work on Ferrari theme park
Sat Nov 3, 2007
Abu Dhabi on Saturday began work on building the world's first Ferrari theme park, another step in the wealthy Gulf emirate's ambition to become a global centre for leisure, sport and culture.
A ceremony was held for the laying of the project's first foundation stone on Yas Island off the coast of the capital of the United Arab Emirates, project developer ALDAR said.
The 250,000-square-metre (62-acre) park is set for completion in 2009.
It will include a motor circuit which is to host the emirate's first F1 Grand Prix in the same year, as well as roller coasters, multi-media theatres and automobile displays, ALDAR said in a statement.
An investment group owned by the government of oil-rich Abu Dhabi in July bought a five percent stake in Ferrari for 114 million dollars.
Warner Brothers announced in September it plans to open its own theme park in Abu Dhabi, which is already developing a satellite Louvre museum and staged its first international film festival earlier this year.
Abu Dhabi is one of seven emirates that make up the UAE, which also includes Dubai.
The booming city-state of Dubai has its own grand cultural aspirations. It already hosts an annual international film festival that is attended by high-profile Hollywood stars.
Earlier this year, Cirque du Soleil announced it would stage a permanent show on a huge artificial island off Dubai, and Universal Studios plans to build a theme park in the emirate at a cost of more than two billion dollars.
Abu Dhabi begins work on Ferrari theme park
Sat Nov 3, 2007
Abu Dhabi on Saturday began work on building the world's first Ferrari theme park, another step in the wealthy Gulf emirate's ambition to become a global centre for leisure, sport and culture.
A ceremony was held for the laying of the project's first foundation stone on Yas Island off the coast of the capital of the United Arab Emirates, project developer ALDAR said.
The 250,000-square-metre (62-acre) park is set for completion in 2009.
It will include a motor circuit which is to host the emirate's first F1 Grand Prix in the same year, as well as roller coasters, multi-media theatres and automobile displays, ALDAR said in a statement.
An investment group owned by the government of oil-rich Abu Dhabi in July bought a five percent stake in Ferrari for 114 million dollars.
Warner Brothers announced in September it plans to open its own theme park in Abu Dhabi, which is already developing a satellite Louvre museum and staged its first international film festival earlier this year.
Abu Dhabi is one of seven emirates that make up the UAE, which also includes Dubai.
The booming city-state of Dubai has its own grand cultural aspirations. It already hosts an annual international film festival that is attended by high-profile Hollywood stars.
Earlier this year, Cirque du Soleil announced it would stage a permanent show on a huge artificial island off Dubai, and Universal Studios plans to build a theme park in the emirate at a cost of more than two billion dollars.
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