Saudi Arabia’s wildly ambitious plan to build 500m tall, mirrored, 170km long parallel skyscrapers, forming a 1.5M population desert city has been curtailed to 2.4km long.
The news was broken by the financial news publication Bloomberg, which said that Saudi Arabia’s government had “scaled back its medium-term ambitions” for Neom, of which The Line is the most significant sub-project.
The Saudi government had hoped to have 1.5M residents living in The Line by 2030, but this has been scaled back to fewer than 300,000, according to the report. It is unclear how it intends to house a higher concentration of people considering the proposed length (and therefore area) has been massively slashed.
desert sun’s rays nuke the lake in front of glass wall/city
“Where lake go?”
That’s not a big problem since this is in a desert. Getting any water there in the first place is the problem. And, based on the mockups I saw, there’s supposed to be a lot of greenery.
water policies of saudi arabia are straight up insane. riyadh takes half of water from seashore desalination plants (that burn massive amounts of oil, so big that it cuts into their oil revenue very significantly). for the other half, they have somehow found non-renewable water, literal fossil water, and it’ll run out in decade (might have misremembered). at the same time there are no water meters in the city at all
Apparently Ireland hasn’t billed for water either, and the prospect of the introduction of billing had activists objecting on grounds like “you can’t charge for water, water is life-critical and a human right”. I remember reading comments on /r/Europe from Irish readers who were really upset at the prospect of needing to pay for water.
googles
It looks like as implemented, billing is only for households that use substantially more than the average and start going out late this year:
https://www.moneyguideireland.com/water-charges-2017-new-rules.html
ireland has less issues with potable water supply i suspect
also unrelated but why are you googling loudly
You’ve missed the point that the government had relatively recently introduced a ‘temporary’ Universal Service Charge during the recession and had not (and have not to this day) removed it. I was in favour of metering water but the argument wasn’t as simplistic as you’re making it.
Ireland being a low density country with an inundation of fresh water rain and springs is certainly worth mentioning when comparing with Saudi Arabia though…
It would just fry anyone who stands there for more than five minutes.
probably beats living in saudi arabia
I don’t know it’s probably great for Bonesaw McKillajournalist.