64UNNATURALLY COOLIn Dubai, I met with Mohammed Alabbar, one of twelve children raised
by illiterate parents in a palm- thatch barasti hut. His mother cooked the
family’s meals over a fire. Alabbar grew up poor, and his upbringing in
the 1950s and 1960s was far from unique.
Since there were few roads or vehicles in Dubai and no electricity or
running water, there was no demand for modern energy services. Petro-
leum was imported and used sparingly. Kerosene was reserved for lamps
that illuminated homes. Precious fresh water was stored in earthen jars,
which kept it chilled through evaporative cooling. Toilets— even those
in the ruler’s compound— were pits dug into the sandy earth. Clean water
was in such short supply that people bathed in the sea.
Homes of wealthier residents of Dubai and other coastal towns fea-
tured the natural cooling of the barjeel, the ubiquitous wind towers that
captured passing breezes and funneled them indoors. Alabbar’s family
barasti had no such luxury. The loose weave of the palm thatch allowed
breezes to penetrate.
But as he grew up, oil wealth flowed in. Alabbar became a success-
ful property developer, paving the desert around him with cookie-
cutter townhomes and shopping centers. In 2004, he started work
on the Burj Khalifa, which would become the tallest building in the
world— so tall that visitors to its observation deck can see all the way to
Iran. Next door to the Burj Khalifa is another of his projects, the Dubai
Mall, one of the world’s largest. Alabbar upgraded his own accommo-
dations too, trading the shack of his boyhood for a vast mansion with
a six- hole golf course on its grounds. By the time I met him, he was a
billionaire.
The growth in Alabbar’s personal energy use over the course of a
single lifetime was a microcosm of the city around him. His energy
demand grew from tiny scraps of biomass and small amounts of water
from an underground aquifer to enormous amounts of natural gas–
generated electricity and fresh water produced via the energy- intensive
process of desalinating seawater. The Burj Khalifa was probably the big-
gest single addition to the Dubai power grid, with an electricity load so
massive it required a dedicated substation, the world’s highest, on the
155th floor.^1 Every time someone flushes a toilet on the Burj’s upper floors,