A Place to Stand

From the Times

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.

The scheme is likely to infuriate environmentalists. The revelation comes as more than 11,000 politicians, green campaigners and others are gathered in Poznan, Poland, for the latest talks on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Last week the Met Office released a report warning that if greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise, the world could warm by an average of 5.5C by 2100. Inefficient buildings are one of the world’s greatest sources of greenhouse gases.

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.”

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.

Abedian’s firm began its association with Versace a decade ago with the idea of creating the first chain of luxury fashion-branded lifestyle resorts.

The first Palazzo Versace is already operating on Australia’s Gold Coast – where Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, the actors, have stayed – and the Dubai hotel will be the second when it opens late next year or early 2010. The 10-storey hotel will have 213 rooms, several with their own internal swimming pools, plus 169 apartments. Fifteen more such hotels are planned.

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.

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Good for Dubai. I have previously described Dubai as being the equivalent of a seastead - ie a small piece of territory with nothing going for it except the absence of government parasitism. Dubai is not oil rich, unlike the rest of the Emirates, but is the most successful of them purely on having a high growth, free market attitude. I suppose that can be considered a "bubble world" but the fact is that climate change, far from being something to be concerned about, is being used, fraudulently by government & eco-fascists to get more control over us. There is nothing destructive about using energy if there is no shortage of it. We know that there is no shortage of energy - there is enough for at least the next 5 billion years in easily available natural uranium & millions of times more than that could be produced by solar power satellites. It is only a matter of government ceasing to prevent us using it.

One thing that can always be said for certain is that if somebody is doing something, or it has been done in the past, it is possible to do it & every politician who says it isn't is a liar.

Any person or indeed political party or "news" outlet which claims that that there is any need for a shortage of, or the present high price of electricity is personally a wholly, completely & totally corrupt fascist who will tell any lie whatsoever to enhance their power & whose word can never, ever, on any subject whatsoever, be trusted. This, of course, includes the Labour, Lib Dem, Conservative & SNP parties & the entire news & managements staff of the BBC, ITN & almost all our press - not one loyal member of whom can claim as much integrity & human decency as a normal person's toenail clippings - no offence.

With presently understood technology we can make everybody in the world the equivalent of a billionaire within decades & all of these politicians know that to be the case but prefer power.

Labels: British politics, eco-fascism, Government parasitism