Is this a sign of the times to come or a sign of the crimes to come? The UK Times reports:
Versace, the renowned fashion house, is to create the world’s first refrigerated beach so that hotel guests can walk comfortably across the sand on scorching days. The beach will be next to the the new Palazzo Versace hotel which is being built in Dubai where summer temperatures average 40C and can reach 50C.
The beach will have a network of pipes beneath the sand containing a coolant that will absorb heat from the surface. The swimming pool will be refrigerated and there are also proposals to install giant blowers to waft a gentle breeze over the beach.
And in the understatement of the year, the Times adds:
The scheme is likely to infuriate environmentalists.
I’m guessing the resort will also be introducing Hummer golf carts and coal-powered jet-skis. Then again, maybe the snarkiness is premature. Maybe this will be a “sustainable” refrigerated beach:
However, Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace, said he believed it is possible to design a refrigerated beach and make it sustainable. “We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,” he said. “This is the kind of luxury that top people want.”
Note to Soheil Abedian — we have a sustainable refrigerated beach, and it’s called the West Coast of the United States. But if you really wanted to make this “sustainable” then at least power it with solar thermal baseload — you’re in a friggin’ desert after all.
Hyder Consulting, a British construction consultancy, is overseeing the engineering on the project. The hotel will be marketed strongly in the UK where Dubai is a popular tourist destination, attracting about 800,000 Britons a year.
Terrific, the British can cut their own emissions sharply and then fly elsewhere to detroy the planet (see “UK goes for 80% cut“).
Competition to serve the world’s rich is getting intense, especially in Dubai. The city already boasts the world’s first seven-star hotel, the Burj Al Arab, while Armani, a competitor with Versace, is building a similarly branded Dubai hotel.
The refrigerated beach is designed to give Versace the edge in this battle of luxury lifestyles. The system will be controlled by thermostats linked to computers.
Versace’s plans have shocked environmentalists. Rachel Noble, the campaigns officer at Tourism Concern, which promotes sustainable tourism, said that the carbon generated by such projects would contribute to climate change, whose worst effects would be felt by the poor.
“Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so that people can continue their destructive lifestyles,” she said.
Aided by cheap oil and gas, Middle Eastern nations have poured enormous resources into controlling temperature. About 60% of Dubai’s huge power bill is for air-conditioning; each person living there has a carbon footprint of more than 44 tons of CO2 a year.
These plans should not just be shocking to environmentalists. They should be shocking to anyone who cares about the health and well-being of future generations. Certainly Americans are in no position to tell others not to destroy the climate, at least not yet.
But the time will come pretty damn soon when such traditional conspicuous consumption will be seen for what it really is, conspicuous self-destruction. As the horrific reality of climate change becomes self-evident, first we will see boycotts of brands like Versace, who apparently want to see the whole world turned into Venice (see “Venice flooding provides glimpse of what’s to come“). Then we will see trade barriers and sanctions against entire countries that refuse to join the planetary struggle to preserve the health and well-being of the next 50 generations.
We have all the wealth we need to act — the lemming-esque luxury of Palazzo Versacci is but one clear piece of evidence that we could easily part with 0.11% of it per year (see “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly” and “Must read IEA report, Part 1: Act now with clean energy or face 6°C warming. Cost is NOT high — media blows the story“). Certainly that’s not much to pay to avoid an inundated, ice-free, desertified planet with one large hot, acidified dead zone in place of our teeming oceans (see “Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 0: The alternative is humanity’s self-destruction“).
But hey, when the ocean is dead, Palazzo Versace can just recreate a fake ocean full of tropical fish, corals, and other living creatures driven by a big petroleum-driven wave machine.
What did the Bible say? The rich ye shall always have with you. Something like that.
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This could sort of be “greened” by the use of solar adsorption cooling. In terms of the local insolation probably an ideal location for this technology.
http://www.solarserver.de/solarmagazin/artikeljuni2002-e.html
Given all the greenwashing in the world, I’d need more detail on the method they think is “possible”. But the founder and president seems to refer specifically to possibly making the cooled beach sustainable. So what about the chilled swimming pools etc.? Since they apparently love big & expensive things over there, maybe they could build a renewable energy system with enough surplus to send into a regional grid. Imagine that: A mentality that puts as much thought into environmental and social responsibility as it does luxury. What’d be the odds?
Look on my works ye mighty and despair!
I’m thinking there are going to be some pretty bad sunburns. Who wants to stand under a broiler and have there feet cooled.
Dill Weed
Nice post on yet another amazing display in the Emirates. (Although, to be fair, there is also a solar, zero-emissions city rising there instead of in the American Southwest). Ultimately, the “cool beach” is just a more extravagant variant of the “climate divide” I’ve been writing about for years now — between rich countries that can (at least for decades) use wealth and technology to limit their climate exposure while the poorest once, with little history of adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, are already sitting ducks for today’s climate extremes, let alone what may come from the greenhouse jolt.
Deep water cooling: http://www.enwave.com/dlwc.php
Maybe I’m missing something, but wouldn’t the pipes under the surface work as a heat exchanger? It’s not refrigeration, so doesn’t waste energy. Perhaps “sustainable” would involve using that heat elsewhere.
On another note, this all seems incredibly stupid.
“Posted under Humor”. – Yes. Very funny.
The rich ye shall always have with you.
Only if you tolerate them. Only if you want them.
The whole problem, of course, is that no one really gets angry about something like this. Everyone’s just too spiritually drained and tired by now, I guess. Humanity is spent. That’s why all we have left are jokes and “snarkiness”, which aren’t weapons, but white flags.
That’s how the enemy won the war.
Worry less about the 0.0001% that is absurd.
Worry more about the bigger stuff….
reminds me the indoor ski hill resort and the palm shaped islands but it also reminds me of the fact that I used to go ice skating in the summer.
wasted energy is everywhere.
Why are the rich hated so? Let me count the ways.*
*Hint: It’s equal to the amount of BTU’s to power that ‘cool off the beach on a blistering hot day’ fool’s errand.
What a sad situation. Someone should put up posters of starving children for the beach goers to geer at, while they get cancer but stay cool while doing it.
Just remember that there’s a good chance that their refrigerated beach will be under water not all that far in the future. Maybe then they will skate on it?
Worry less about the 0.0001% that is absurd.
Worry more about the bigger stuff….
Indeed. But everyone has the same lame response to the bigger stuff as well. Is anyone angry about the monumental capital crimes of Wall St and the banks? Not really. Will there be justice and restitution (and yes, retribution)? Doesn’t look like it. Will the sinners get the full enjoyment of the wages of their sin, while the millions of victims suffer? Sure does look like it.
But like I said, we can only be victims of ourselves. Only if we allow it.
A gauge of how pathetic we are: It’s actually impressive that someone punched Richard Fuld (if that even really happened). I remember being disgusted that evidently no one from Enron was even insulted on the street, let alone lynched like they deserved.
Sorry if this is overly grim for a climate change board. But then again, all the same points apply in the case of climate change holocaust deniers, who want to forcibly confine us in a coffin in time for the landslide to bury us forever.
I guess I’m just sick of the endless talk and faux-anger, which ends up dissipated in sarcasm and post-modern “coolness” and irony. It’s all just another form of self-indulgence. And all the while the enemy smiles and keeps working. That’s part of why Marx hated what he called “bourgeois socialism”, what today is called “liberalism” – he knew it would content itself with at most feckless words and anemic “reforms”, but would never be a potent foe of the basic destructive machinery.
As for this sodomite playland for the “top people” (the guy’s quote in the post), it is “absurd”, but it’s alot more than that. It’s aesthetically repulsive, and coming at this economic time, it’s clearly an intentional insult to the world’s people. It’s an open declaration of global class war, or more precisely a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner. That’s all Dubai is, existentially.
(Why do Dubai and the other emirates exist at all? The UAE is of course not a real country. On the contrary it, like Kuwait (another fake country, glorified corporate park) is clearly meant to politically separate as much oil from as many of the people as possible. A few plutocrat sheiks are far more tractable than “the people” to whom that oil really belongs; whose property has been stolen and is now being used for things like indoor ski hills and refrigerated beaches.)
super Maybe I’m missing something, but wouldn’t the pipes under the surface work as a heat exchanger? It’s not refrigeration, so doesn’t waste energy. Perhaps “sustainable” would involve using that heat elsewhere.