City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (37 page)

Abu Dhabi’s investments aren’t just good publicity. Rather than lavishing energy on air-conditioning, it can sell it to foreigners. By contrast, Dubai is partying like it’s 1999. The city’s electricity consumption nearly doubled between 2002 and 2007. Dubai will need to spend nearly $10
billion to keep up with demand expected to rise 16 percent a year until 2015.
⁹
Power consumption in tiny Dubai could reach half the level of Florida’s in twelve years.
¹⁰
Crazy as it sounds, the world’s most energy-rich region is short of power.

“Dubai’s got a mountain to climb. I see it as a key risk,” says Philipp Lotter, who heads the Dubai office of rating agency Moody’s, which analyzed the power sector. “Everyone’s obsessed about the real estate crash. But if there’s a single risk to sustainable growth, it’s the energy risk.”

The UAE energy shortage is already crimping the housing supply. Finished apartments in Dubai sat empty in 2008 because the utility lacked capacity to connect them to the grid.
¹¹
North of Dubai, in Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, and Ras Al-Khaimah, apartments, malls, and half-built gated communities sit in the dark because there is no energy to light them. Incredibly, Ajman plans to build a huge $2 billion coal-fired power plant.
¹²
Coal, the dirtiest fuel, is the one fossil fuel that Arabia lacks. The closest mines are in India and South Africa, countries accustomed to being on the receiving end of the UAE’s energy trade.

Abu Dhabi does have huge gas reserves. But much of it is toxic and requires expensive scrubbing before it can be burned. The emirate is just getting started on the investments needed to make the gas usable. Long term, the UAE plans to meet its needs with nuclear power, but Moody’s says that’s more than ten years away.

The UAE has one thing going for it in this respect: money. If Dubai needs to retrofit all its buildings with window shading and high-efficiency cooling, or if it must build solar energy farms in the desert, it can. “Being wealthy, they can afford more stupidity,” Wackernagel says. “You can do crazy things and get away with them.”

In the flat wastes of Dubai’s southwest outskirts sits a green glass building. It’s a simple horseshoe facing the highway with a red-lit sign reading
PACIFIC CONTROLS.
Inside, the atmosphere at midday is a soothing twilight. Windows are shaded with sun-blocking curtains. Hallway lights spring to life when you approach and dim as you pass. Occupied offices are cool and bright. Empty ones are warm and dark.

The business of Pacific Controls is controls—software that allows
buildings to be managed remotely, from a computer. The programs govern thermostats, alarms, sewage disposal, telephones, lights, and everything else. The company manages power use at Dubai International Airport and apartment towers in the Dubai Marina, and it monitors fire and burglar alarms for Dubai Civil Defence authorities.

But the most impressive thing about Pacific Controls is the message carried on a plaque in the lobby. This is the first building in the Middle East given a platinum rating under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the U.S. green buildings standard known as LEED. In 2007, the Pacific Controls building became the sixteenth building in the world to achieve platinum status, the LEED’s highest rating. In a city that prizes superlatives like no other, that kind of recognition was enough to bring Sheikh Mohammed’s right-hand man, Mohammed al-Gergawi, to the building’s inauguration in 2007.

Dilip Rahulan, the Indian-born Australian who founded Pacific Controls, gave Gergawi a tour.
¹³
One array of solar panels on the roof—technically illegal under Dubai’s outdated utilities code—produces electricity for the building’s lighting. A second array powers a quarter of the building’s air-conditioning. The air-conditioning chiller uses the evaporative cooling method used in old kerosene refrigerators, applying heat to produce cold. The building’s dark glass blocks the sun’s heat, and its software tweaks lighting and temperature. Everything is calibrated to save energy. The stairs are prominent and central, and with just five stories, the elevator is a convenience. The building uses 35 percent less power than a comparable structure.

Gergawi was impressed. A day later he phoned Rahulan to tell him that Sheikh Mohammed appreciated his initiative. “Stay tuned,” Gergawi said.
¹⁴

Later that day, Sheikh Mohammed made a dramatic announcement: Starting January 1, 2008, every new building launched in Dubai would have to comply with environmental standards. Until Dubai developed its own, the basic LEED standard would be the minimum. Rahulan believes the directive is among the toughest sustainability laws on any city’s books.

Sheikh Mohammed made the directive in October, less than three months before it would take effect. It required architects and engineers to scramble to rework designs to comply. A rule change like that would take years to push through in the European Union or the United States.
Of course, rules are only as good as their enforcement. And the UAE has a notoriously difficult time implementing its laws, especially those requiring inspections. If Sheikh Mohammed’s directive is followed, future buildings will be at least 12 percent more energy efficient than those built before 2008.

Pacific Controls believes it can make money this way. A more realistic tariff rate by the Dubai utility might bring the chance to retrofit buildings with efficient switches. Many buildings could cut consumption by 30 percent right now, just by turning off the lights and air-conditioning at night.
¹⁵

Dubai has made a few strides as of late. Besides Sheikh Mohammed’s green buildings directive, the emirate in October 2008 announced it was considering mandating the use of solar power to produce hot water and perhaps electricity. There has also been discussion about creating an environmental agency with enforcement powers, like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Abu Dhabi already has one. At the time of writing, Dubai’s EPA hadn’t been decided upon. Environmental issues were just starting to gain attention in Sheikh Mohammed’s Executive Office. “We definitely will have to do something about it,” says Nabil al-Yousuf.

The Gulf’s development rampage may be enriching humans, but it’s been a disaster for wildlife. The once-pristine UAE coast has been inundated with Florida-style sprawl that is knocking out species one by one. Neighboring Oman, too, a country so untrammeled it was like a national park, is now coming under the developer’s bulldozer. The white-collared kingfisher, an extremely rare subspecies that exists only in mangrove swamps in the UAE and Oman, is down to about fifty nesting pairs. The Arabian tahr, a mountain goat, and the Arabian leopard are nearing extinction in the UAE.
¹⁶
The Arabian oryx, a large antelope, is already extinct in the wild. In Oman, a luxury hotel was built on a beach used as a nesting site for the critically endangered hawksbill turtle. Other developments have taken habitat from the rare Socotra cormorant and the dugong, or sea cow, a marine mammal akin to the manatee.

A mangrove and flamingo sanctuary in Dubai was handed over for a luxury development dubbed The Lagoons. And a giant mangrove flat at
nearby Umm Al-Quwain, vital habitat for migratory birds, is being developed by Emaar as a marina and resort. Scuba divers have fled Dubai for the clearer waters off the east coast.

“We try to be positive. But sometimes for your own sanity you block out what’s going on,” says Habiba al-Marashi, chairwoman of the Emirates Environmental Group. “In the end I can only do so much.”
¹⁷

Dubai’s contribution to the environmental mess isn’t just emissions. The Palm Islands, which brought the city fame, are among its worst offenders. The Palm Jebel Ali got dropped into a protected wildlife zone, burying much of a coral reef. Bits of the reef remain uncovered and Nakheel wants to revive it, but the damage is done. Other man-made archipelagoes have buried oyster and sea grass beds. Dredging, which could continue for another decade or two, has left the sea a silty fog, killing algae, plants, oysters—basically everything that can’t get up and swim away.

The Palms have also altered the Gulf’s offshore currents, probably forever.
¹⁸
Sand used to drift with the prevailing northeast currents along the shore from Abu Dhabi, past Dubai and into Sharjah. The new islands have blocked those replenishing flows. Sand is piling up on the southwest side of town, while the altered currents now scoop away Dubai’s beaches. The city is stuck replenishing its beaches by dumptruck.

Dubai’s build first, ask questions later ethic isn’t the type of setting that encourages environmentalists. Bucking the odds is Habiba al-Marashi, a forty-five-year-old former government official, who now spends her days lecturing and hectoring, trying to get Emiratis and the two hundred other nationalities in Dubai to consider the resources they waste.

Al-Marashi wears the black
abaya
of a local woman, with her
shayla
wrapped tightly around her face, so that no wisps of hair stray out. She has the disarming habit of laughing when she discusses dire issues.

Al-Marashi is resigned to struggling in a country destined to remain among the world’s worst polluters, because the barren UAE can never soak up the carbon dioxide its spews. “This is a fact. We’ll always be in the top ten. We have to desalinate water or we will die,” she says. “But
the culprit isn’t that we’re desalinating water. It’s that our consumption is wasteful. People live excessively here.”

She focuses on the things she can change, starting with behavior. Al-Marashi is a born activist. She has no training in environmental science. She didn’t grow up as a Bedouin in the desert. But her parents taught her that national pride meant caring for the land. Islam says the same thing. Every day she finds herself yelling at litterers and spitters, those cramming paper in the recycling bin meant for plastic. Smokers tossing butts are a favorite target. “Excuse me, can you pick that up? There’s a garbage bin right there,” she tells them. “Don’t do it next time.”

Problem is, environmentalists find themselves bumping into the sheikhs’ ruling bargain. People fritter away electricity and water because it is subsidized and cheap—nearly free, if you’re an Emirati. Royal families trade these subsidies for the popular mandate that keeps them in power. Al-Marashi, a mother of four, says the policy has spoiled the country’s residents.

“The UAE acts like a spoiled child. It’s like these brat children. They go into the playroom and mess it up. You have to go clean up after them. And they go back in and mess it up again,” she says. “There’s lots of apathy. If you’re using more than your fair share, you should pay more.”

THE LAWLESS ROADS

THE FOG HAD
rolled in off the Gulf and lay thick and woolly when twenty-six-year-old Matthias Seifert left for work on March 11, 2008. He set off in his sporty red Peugeot 307 hatchback for the hour-and-a-half drive. It’d be dangerous for a while, but once he was off Abu Dhabi island, the fog would probably thin. Seifert, a German who manages seaplane flights at the five-star Jebel Ali resort, had a full day’s work ahead and didn’t want to delay. Anyway, he was used to fog.

He crossed the Maqta Bridge to the mainland and started up the
highway toward Dubai. Seifert drove straight past the Adnoc gas station. Its brightly lit blue trim is normally visible a half mile away. But he didn’t see it until he was past it. He thought, “Okay, I’ll stop at the next one.” But Seifert breezed past the second Adnoc as well. He couldn’t see from one light pole to the next, but he kept driving anyway.