Saudi Arabia is proposing to build a megacity called Neom in the desert.

The details are stunning. It’s a mixture of dystopian fiction (AI surveillance cameras everywhere!) and childish imaginings (let’s build a robot dinosaur park!). Taken together, the plans remind of you what a dedicated nine-year-old can achieve in Minecraft. Yes, the scale and ambition are impressive, but it’s not like you could do this in real life, right?

Nothing is impossible. But Saudi Arabia proposed building six megacities in 2005 and only one got off the ground: King Abdullah Economic City. This aims to have a population of 2 million by 2035. A year ago, the population had reached… 7,000.

Good luck with that.

But back to Neom:

Whether Neom will live up to its planners’ dreams, though, is anyone’s guess. A lot of factors have stopped Saudi Arabia attracting international business thus far, notes the WSJ, including corruption, a difficult legal system, and social norms that range from unappealing to straightforwardly immoral for Western visitors. Alcohol is banned; women’s rights are restricted; and homosexuality is illegal. (The WSJ reports that some of these strictures might be relaxed for Neom.) That’s not to mention the sweltering weather, which climate change will certainly exacerbate, creating extreme heatwaves and flooding.

Like sunlight in a desert, the brilliance of this plan blows my mind. It’s almost like they sat down and said, “What is literally the worst thing we could do to the planet?”

This from the country that currently burns 700,000 barrels of oil a day in the summer months to produce electricity. Of which 70% is for air conditioning.