Keeping Your Toes Cool in Dubai

We’re not terribly critical of energy end users, though our father certainly could be if we let out the air conditioning by leaving the front door open too long.

But even we might find our limit. This caught our eye while we were working on a story about the proposed 123 agreement between the U.S. and UAE (we’ll have more on that later):

Versace, the renowned fashion house, has defended its proposal to build the world’s first refrigerated beach in Dubai...

Why defend the indefensible? Just plow ahead and hope for the best.

The beach, next to the new Palazzo Versace hotel overlooking Dubai Creek, is expected to be artificially cooled to avoid Dubai’s searing summer temperatures.

Proposals have included a cooling system under the sand and blowing in cooled air from the Versace hotel.

That last part would really make Dad holler. One has to wonder how cold they’d have to keep the hotel to share its cooling with an open beach.

As you might guess, this hasn’t gone over very well and you scarcely need an environmentalist to point out its flaws. None the less:

Prominent Dubai-based environmentalist, Nils Al Accad, founder of Dubai Organic Foods and Café … slammed the proposals.

“If it was sand beside a swimming pool, you might have some chance, but cooling a whole beach is completely wasteful, a disaster,” he said.

But of course, so much can be spun, if not always plausibly, greenly:

He [Al Accad] made his comments after Soheil Abedian, the founder and president of Palazzo Versace’s developer, Sunland, told the London Sunday Times that he wanted to create an environmentally sustainable cooled beach.

Good luck on that! Let’s get the nuclear energy plants built first. Abedian does let slip, like the dogs of war, the more likely reason behind this:

“This is the kind of luxury that top people want.”

So if you want it, you get a little energy class warfare to toy with. Truly, this is a story with multiple angles, all of them a different shade of ghastly. We suspect Versace will let, uh, cooler heads prevail, but in the meantime, the entertainment value here is boundless.

A room at the Palazzo Versace in Dubai. We suspect this is called the Orange Room. Maybe orange is a color “top people” like.