There’s a former nursery across from the royal family’s private terminal at the Abu Dhabi airport. It doesn’t look like much now—1,600 acres of sand dotted with small, forlorn trees. But one fenced-in spot on the property hints of a plan so ambitious that it stands out even in a land of seemingly limitless wealth. There, atop concrete slabs, engineers are preparing to test solar collectors. Those collectors are scheduled to power a futuristic 100,000-resident city that will rise from this sandy wasteland by the Persian Gulf. The goal: to create the world’s first metropolis that emits not a single extra molecule of carbon dioxide, the cause of global warming.
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