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Comment by QuarterReptile | Hacker News Reader

I agree with most of what you've said, but I'd also argue that having large groups living out in the desert is such an absurd configuration for humans that it presupposes an indifference for any sort of sustainability.

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The unique problem of desert cities seems to be inappropriate landscaping. Even San Francisco ships its water in from over 100 miles away - not having enough water locally is just a problem of cities in general. The AC story is much worse in a desert city, but the heating story is much worse in cities in cold climates. There's also the benefit that I tend to need my AC when the sun is high in the sky, which aligns perfectly with solar. I live in SoCal and almost never use any heating, even in winter.

Even Rome built aqueducts.

You may find this hard to believe, but moving heat around (i.e. air conditioning) is more energy efficient than straight up heating. It is more environmentally friendly when you consider that in many cold locales in the US, heat is provided not by electricity, but by a shitload of on-site oil-fired devices.

I googled this, because I did find it hard to believe, and I think you're correct. According to the below source, for example, heating a home in Atlanta, Georgia throughout the winter months costs about twice as much as air conditioning it in the summer months.

[0]: http://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/30576/Heating-or-Cooling-...

> an indifference for any sort of sustainability.

That's a pretty apt general description of Las Vegas.

And Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and much of the southwest in general.

The LA Basin is not a desert.

Technically it is.

Technically, it's still not; it's a dry-summer Mediterranean climate; in the Köppen system, it's a Csb, arid climates are B, Desert is BW with h/k/n in the third position depending on temperature.

I would actually put Vegas as one of the most sustainable cities in the US out of necessity. Vegas's per capita water use is about 1/4 of the US average including all of those crazy fountains on the strip. They don't irrigate anything compared to places like Phoenix and almost all municipal water hookups use reclaimed water unlike most other cities where people have an aversion to drinking filtered piss. Vegas also gets almost all of its energy from renewable sources (hydro and a tiny amount of solar) compared to the US as a whole which is only about 10%. Colorado by comparison gets about 60% of it's electricity from coal.

Fair enough. Consider me educated. It was a quick jab with only an outsider's superficial perspective.

    s/Las Vegas/Phoenix

Having large groups living in mega city heat islands is also an absurd configuration but pretty much the entire world is guilty of that one.

Eh, not really. Cities are better for Co2

Is that established? I believe that there are major giant cities that operate with a lower CO2 footprint than suburban and rural areas might, per capita. But there is the cost of all the CO2 that allowed that urbanization; NYC didn't get the subway without a carbon cost, all that steel in the buildings released a lot of carbon, etc..

CO2 per capita is not the only measure of absurdity.

Because it's not absurd, the advantages of city living are too numerous to count. Your premise is flawed.

> but I'd also argue that having large groups living out in the desert is such an absurd configuration for humans that it presupposes an indifference for any sort of sustainability

They didn't give a damn when those cities were first founded. The issue wasn't probably even on the mind of anyone on the planet. Same is true about cities in seismically-active regions.

It's too late to fix that. You'd have to convince millions to abandon their homes and go... somewhere else.

> I'd also argue that having large groups living out in the desert is such an absurd configuration for humans that it presupposes an indifference for any sort of sustainability.

It's easier to irrigate a flat desert with fertile soil than to move the flat terrain and fertile soil closer to a water source.

Food production is a fairly important component of sustainable human societies, and a major reason for the US (California particularly) having inhabited deserts and semi-arid regions.

That may be true but desert cities are still a reality. It might be possible somehow "close" these cities but that seems like something that is not going to happen anytime soon unless they simply become uninhabitable. So given people are going to be living here it makes sense to make things more efficient.

Most desert cities were founded before electricity, let alone air conditioning. Phoenix, Arizona was apparently founded as a farming town, and was quite sustainable at its early population.

You can't stop people from moving and aggregating. Relocating hundreds of millions of people into freshly-built temperate cities is obviously impractical, not to mention more resource-intensive in the short and medium term than air conditioning their current residences. We have to develop techniques that work with the world as it is, not just pine for utopias that might have been.

Better to put people in the desert than in places where they displace a lot of existing biodiversity (like, say, all of our coastal cities).

Not necessarily. These cities have a huge appetite for fresh water and can starve entire ecosystems of it.

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