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)
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
