A luxury hotel for the Northern Lights Crowd on the South Coast, and in front of the construction site, surely, the most carbon-wasteful billboard imaginable. The amount of rubber that wears off those tires joins the rubber that wears off the hundreds of thousands of cars rushing past every summer, too.

But I bet the hotel is planning on letting you keep your towels for an extra day without laundering them. Truth is, the carbon footprint of the concrete that goes into every building in Iceland can hardly be paid for by being “green” for a lifetime.