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Spend a few days prowling the packed exhibition floor of Abu Dhabi's World Future Energy Summit, and you might forget that the global economy is suffering through an existential crisis that has overshadowed just about everything else - including climate change. Booths showing off the technology of Chinese solar companies and German wind businesses buzz with visitors. Conference panels on biofuels or green design are half-empty, but that's only because attendees are busier cutting deals...
Over 16,000 visitors came to the summit, nearly 50% more than the previous year. And at the center of it is Abu Dhabi's own Masdar Initiative - named after the city of Masdar, a newly built green metropolis designed to be a center for clean technology. Even though the petroleum-rich emirate is suffering through plummeting oil prices - now a little over $40 a barrel, down a hundred dollars from a half a year ago - its leaders say they remain committed to expanding Masdar. "The current financial crisis has absolutely no impact on our planned projects," says Sultan Ahmed...
...Abu Dhabi isn't the last place you'd expect to find ambitious plans for solar energy and ultra-green construction, it has to be close. The seaside capital of the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) is the world's fifth largest producer of petroleum, and the wealth that oil brings this former fishing village is evident in the foreign luxury cars that choke its highways, running on gas that costs just 45 cents a gallon. But a year ago, the government launched the multibillion-dollar Masdar Initiative, a combination clean-tech investment fund, property developer and renewable-energy start...
...York Times put it recently, a kind of Davos for the postcarbon set. And while much of the rest of the world is using the financial crisis as an excuse to put off the transition to cleaner power, in the WFES's opening session today, Abu Dhabi announced that it had pledged that 7% of its energy would come from renewable sources by 2020, up from nothing today. "This is really a very powerful image," says Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one of the summit's A-list attendees. "It clearly shows...
...desert metropolis - where watering keeps the lawns green in the dry winter and everything is air-conditioned - represents at least one future of environmentalism, a future that embraces new technology to remedy the ills of old technology. That's because those in the rising developing world - which is how Abu Dhabi is classified, despite a GDP per capita of $63,000 - want to enjoy the energy-intensive lifestyles of the developed world, and they don't want fears over climate change to stop them. The best hope is that the innovation personified by Masdar and the WFES can beat...