Saudi Prince says $500,000,000 will be spent to build "Neom" the city of the future that will run on 100% renewable energy sources. It will be built on the Red Sea coast and comprise 10,000 square miles with a bridge spanning the Red Sea to Egypt.
Look at Dubai. Oil wealth can do incredible things, but it's not necessarily a good thing, Dubai's carbon footprint is enormous. If one decides to live in the desert one shouldn't expect to be able to go ice skating.
New York wasn't built by slaves, a lot of workers in the Gulf are slaves in all but name.
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Despite five years of growing criticism, Fifa and the Qatari authorities have been accused of ongoing indifference towards systemic abuse and “appalling treatment” of migrant workers working on stadiums that will host the 2022 World Cup.
A damning new report by Amnesty International, which interviewed 132 contractors working on refurbishing the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha and a further 102 landscapers who work in the Aspire Zone sports complex that surrounds it, claimed that they all reported human rights abuses of one kind or another.
The findings will prove controversial because Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy has made ensuring minimum standards are met on World Cup stadium projects a priority in the wake of widespread criticism of the broader conditions in which migrant labourers, who make up more than 90% of Qatar’s 2.1m population, live and work.
For the first time, Amnesty said it had definitively identified mistreatment and abuses on a World Cup stadium site rather than on infrastructure projects that underpin Qatar’s ambitious 2030 Vision, of which the football tournament has become an integral part.
It said that workers refurbishing the Khalifa stadium, scheduled to host one of the World Cup semi-finals in 2022, reported they were forced to live in squalid accommodation, appeared to pay huge recruitment fees, and have had wages withheld and passports confiscated. Amnesty conducted the interviews during three visits over the course of a year from February 2015.
Qatari law prohibits retention of passports, delayed payment of wages or deceptive recruitment (where workers are promised a certain wage in their country of origin only to be paid less when they arrive). But Amnesty found evidence that all of those practices remained widespread during the period in question.
The Saudis are poised to become number two in the field of renewable energy, right after Germany. That would be in terms of percentage of total energy production. They can see that down the road in twenty or thirty years they'll be net importing energy if they don't do something.
When you live in a vast desert and the only source of income you have is a product which is quickly losing value, you gotta do something desperate.
The only source of income?
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According to Mecca Chamber and Commerce estimates, Muslims coming from outside country have to spend $ 4,600 on Hajj, while Saudi Arabia's Hajjaj pilgrimage takes $ 1500. Hajj expenses are different for the people of different countries. Every person in Iran's caravan comes near $ 3,000.
So my other post must be taken with a grain of salt (and no, I didn’t mean real salt).
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