From one end of the Arab world to the other….

Waiting in Paris airport for my connecting flight to the far western part of the Arab world I came to think of two interesting articles on climate change I read this week. One was from the productive and knowledgeable fellow blogger Batir Wardam’s blog on the environment. In one of his recent entries he mentions the idea/project of building a carbon friendly – if not totally carbon neutral - new city with room for 700.000 inhabitants close to Amman.

This is interesting for two reasons. First, because it seems that there are a lot of new housing projects being considered and some serious big scale construction work going on in Jordan – and particularly in Amman – for the time being. Second, because focus on carbon neutrality might influence all the ongoing and planned construction in a positive way in order to reduce Jordan’s dependence on imported energy and create more sustainable energy consumption and thus a better environment. I know Batir has been fighting this fight for a long time – often somewhat alone – but I guess that right now is – in light of the circumstances – the right moment to push forward.

My impression was reinforced by an article in the monthly Jordanian magazine “Venture”, which in its May issue ran a long story on renewable energy as one of the major factors in achieving the Jordanian ambition of more energy independence. The story also made a reference to the Danish experience “How Denmark Paved Way to Energy Independence”. I seriously don’t think that all the initiatives – in particular the first mentioned in the article – are suitable for this part of the world, but there is absolutely something to learn from. I very much liked the metaphor that saving on energy was like picking low hanging fruits of a tree.

One of the lessons was that decentralized power and heating generation is crucial in achieving energy efficiency. And that is where all these new constructions projects come into the picture. The point is – make sure you plan, build and integrate decentralised power plants at the same time as you build the new neighbourhoods. It’s much easier and much cheaper than doing it afterwards.

So with this hopefully climate friendly blog contribution my conscious is much better – even though I will be travelling about 9 hours in airplanes today. Had there been direct connections it would only have been around five hours….but it is hard to get from one end of the Arab world to the other….