United Arab Emirates Working on Clean Energy

This is nice to hear about.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL in the New York Times

With one of the highest per capita carbon footprints in the world, these oil-rich emirates would seem an unlikely place for a green revolution.

Gasoline sells for 45 cents a gallon. There is little public transportation and no recycling. Residents drive between air-conditioned apartments and air-conditioned malls, which are lighted 24/7.

Still, the region’s leaders know energy and money, having built their wealth on oil. They understand that oil is a finite resource, vulnerable to competition from new energy sources.

So even as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.

They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.

“Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energy-exporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy,” said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

These are long-term investments in an alternative energy future that neither falling oil prices nor the global downturn seems likely to reverse. Even as the local real estate market is foundering, leaders in politics, business and research from across the globe will flock to this distant kingdom for three days starting Monday for the second World Future Energy Summit, which just one year after its inception here has become something of a Davos gathering on renewable energy.

This year’s guest list includes a former British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the European Union energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, as well as the oil and gas ministers of Oman, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. In attendance will also be executives representing hundreds of companies, large and small, from BP and Credit Suisse to dozens of start-up companies from Europe and the United States....