Word: dhabi
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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...
...will low-carbon enterprises be abandoned as capital floods to safer, established industries and the heat goes off global warming, or is it, as Brenninkmeijer still insists, "the business of the century"? The signs from Abu Dhabi say we could see both. For all the excitement generated here by President Barack Obama, who pledged in his inaugural speech to "harness the sun and the winds and the soil," the short-term outlook for renewables is as grim as it is for other capital-intensive industries, if not more so. (See the 50 best inventions...
...despite short-term forecasts that could leave their balance sheets a sea of red, the general mood in Abu Dhabi was as sunny as the weather. That's because in the long term, developers of renewables know they'll win. Climate change aside, the simple fact that energy demand will continue growing rapidly once the downturn has ended means that new supplies will be needed. And no one - including oil giants of the Middle East - believe that fossil fuels alone will meet that gap. "This is absolutely going to scale big," says Frank Mastiaux, the CEO of the E.ON...
...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 the pace...