Yes, building U.S. cities in hot deserts w/o water wasn’t a great move - but too few know that HEATING homes uses more energy than COOLING does.
Homes in Miami use less energy to control climate than homes in Minneapolis, but we don’t finger-wag about the foolishness of building in cold places.
"Phoenix has lower per capita carbon emissions than Boston" (almost entirely due to heating in Boston) is one of those factoids people get really mad at you if you tell them.
people also don't like hearing that Phoenix has been a continuously inhabited site of fixed agriculture and dense population for several thousands years and is not, in fact, a dumb or unsustainable place to build a city (though it is, in my opinion, unpleasantly hot)
It's frustrating what wasteful water uses people internalize and talk about (golf courses, ai) versus the actual major water risks (bad agriculture policy)
Basically every single other thing is a rounding error compared to "we insist on growing cash crops in the desert because it makes us a little more money"
the basic unit of measurment for agricultural water use in the US is the acre-foot, which is about 325,000 gallons. Alfalfa usually needs about four or six. per acre cultivated. everything else is a rounding error.
People act like large scale farming is some salt-of-the-earth shit but a significant chunk of this country was turned into attempted farmland because people *literally* thought that if you tilled the soil it would directly *cause* rain.
That’s who we defer to on water policy.
We also insist on watering it on the surface, where some huge fraction of the water evaporates, instead of installing stuff like underground irrigation that would reduce that by a lot. This seems like an under-explored area.
That's the frustrating thing. It's not even a necessary thing, and is fairly easily fixed if you can overcome the farming lobby (biggest if).
You can also keep finding variants of this problem across agriculture.
Agreeing and extending. It's frustrating when you agree with some of that critique (e.g. maybe golf courses in the desert aren't the best idea) but get told you're still a problem when you don't fully agree with every item (e.g. okay with golf courses in otherwise naturally wet areas).
I have gathered the lion's share of the water shortage is about agriculture (in Arizona they grow alfalfa for Saudi Arabia; in California they violently resist the slightest suggestions of water efficiency measures) -- and always has been
This weird canard has really developed over the past few years. Trump brought it up I think during the wildfires? Someone whispered a statistic showing total watershed vs current potable water and their minds broke.
One issue is also that we just happen to be at the low point of a several century water cycle, so like 120% of the Colorado is allocated to various rightsholders and both Phoenix and Tucson used to have much more substantial rivers
To be clear the Gila River would perk back up substantially if they stopped growing cotton and fucking alfalfa, but the Santa Cruz was navigable when the Spanish showed up and is now dry most of the year
There is a funny story about a bunch of Kriegsmarine POWs interned in AZ who had a map that showed a river going to Mexico, and when they bust out with the idea of making a raft to float down they come to a riverbed that is just bone dry, and sort of sheepishly go back to the internment camp
When it comes to water use the lawns (which I do dislike) are effectively a rounding error
Most of AZ's water use is agricultural, and a lot of that is due to legal doctrines that actually incentivize growing the most water intensive crops possible
still hilarious though that people in Phoenix irrigate their lawns by just flooding the whole thing
the first time I saw that I thought a pipe had burst and I called municipal utilities
Yeah - I mean, that stuff certainly seems more wasteful, especially given water needs for everyone else and the costs it passes on, but it's not a global issue in the same way as ghg
There’s a lot of towns in the southwest that are way older than “america” even if we only count the ones built by Europeans.
They were not establishing Santa Fe in 1610 with air conditioning in mind.
as a noted golf hater, it pains me to admit that most dry places have converted their golf course watering to be done with gray-water treated wastewater rather than freshwater and they no longer represent the huge waste of water resources they used to
Okay, but I am still going to hate on the one built in a public park near me that takes land meant for the many and makes it off limits to all but a few.
it's not the city that's the problem, it's all the agriculture in Arizona. We give free/subsidized water to all of these welfare queen farmers out West, they suck up all the water, and regular folks get screwed.
Wasn't area Phoenix is on abandoned by its previous inhabitants because of the last cyclic mega-drought in the Southwest, and the 19th Century settlers had to dig out and unblock the dried irrigation canals, hence the name of the new city?
Wouldn't it be dependent on what the water source the city is using and how many ways that water source is being split? It seems to me that it is possible, but it we need much more attention to paid to water usage sustainability.
it is true though that albedo changes from recent urbanization have helped make things particularly unpleasant (though they're learning and fixing it!)
