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...United Arab Emirates (UAE) is blessed with fossil fuels, including the fourth-biggest reserves of oil in the world. Selling that petroleum at record prices has helped Abu Dhabi achieve the highest per-capita GDP in the world - wealth that's visible in every luxury hotel rising from the desert or spotless Mercedes prowling the streets. All those fossil fuels also mean that Abu Dhabi citizens have among the biggest carbon footprints in the world, and the emirate's exports are a big, if indirect, contribution to global climate change...
Even more ambitious is Masdar's plan to build a completely new city in the desert that will produce no carbon and no net waste, chiefly powered by solar energy. Designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster, a veteran in sustainability, Masdar City will eventually house 50,000 residents and more than 1,000 businesses, most of them in alternative power and sustainability. Groundbreaking is set for Feb. 9. Today the space that will be Masdar City, near the international airport, is still empty sand - save for 25 different solar panels being run in an 18-month experiment...
...Even so, conditions are far from ideal. Sarwary's tiny school doesn't have enough classrooms: second-graders huddle in a ragged tent in the courtyard, where a torn strip of khaki canvas hangs between rusting metal struts, blocking many of the girls' view of the blackboard. The fierce desert wind howls through the holes and threatens to tear the class's one textbook from the students' hands as they pass it around for reading lessons. There is no playground or running water. The toilet, a pit latrine located at the far corner of the school compound, serves...
After the beast is through with us, what then? The postapocalypse comes in two varieties: the sterile kind, which leaves behind a dead desert, and the fertile kind, in which destruction makes room for new life and nature gloriously reclaims a human-free earth. In The Road, McCarthy?following Eliot and Mad Max?imagines an earth from which every cell of nonhuman life has been burned. It's a vivid fantasy, but it's not the most plausible scenario. Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a sleeper hit last year, is a carefully researched look at what a depopulated...
...option Cairo has is to look at its history for solutions,” she said. “Some older desert suburbs [such as Heliopolis] were successful. Studying success stories can help planners understand what worked and how to replicate that...