Learning from Las Vegas: Sustainable vs. Susceptible | Hacker News Reader

Learning from Las Vegas: Sustainable vs. Susceptible

granolashotgun.com

78 pointsjeffreyrogers45 comments

As someone who has lived in Las Vegas, this person seems to not give credit where credit is due. First, I don't know how they weren't able to find the cycling path from the store. You can actually see the store and its solar panels from the entrance [1]. Second, the exact thing they are a proponent for is actually the root cause of the water crisis in the southwest. Growing things in a desert. It takes water, a lot of water. The reason why you don't see much green in Las Vegas is because it is a huge water use. So, while the slightly cooler ground directly beneath the tree is nice, it really is the exact opposite of sustainable. Through initiatives like paying to rip up grass lawns, Las Vegas has actually been able to reduce water use by 30% while growing probably something close to 10% in the last 3 years. Point to anywhere else in the US that has actually reduced usage of anything in the last 3 years. This is all with the huge waste of water that is Lake Las Vegas and the golf courses. Which goes back to the main point, the water crisis in the southwest is purely a function of agricultural use in California and to a smaller extent Arizona. Of course Las Vegas relies on outside agriculture but there is going to have to be a shift in the coming decade for more sustainable farming practices in the southwest.

[1] - https://www.google.com/maps/@36.1210033,-115.3267191,3a,75y,...

There's a huge difference between maintaining absurd grass lawns (about everywhere but in rainy England) and maintaining reasonable vegetation.

There is some well-known reasonable vegetation in arid climate: things that naturally grow in such conditions. A cactus here, a baobab there, things like that. That would give a city an even more unique look.

There's also the difference between building stuff in a desert and building it in a more moderate location...

I figure the only reason this stuff is being done at all is because somewhere there is some margin to be made. Sadly, that doesn't magically create more water, but money doesn't care about that.

We can maintain a grass lawn in the PNW without watering it, but I still replaced mine with artificial turf since I hated mowing it. I definitely wouldn’t want to maintain reasonable vegetation.

Arizona (or at least the greater Phoenix metropolitan area) has been replacing agricultural land use with residential for 20+ years.

I'm glad to see this. It is constantly annoying to see there's amateur hot takes on Las Vegas that really ignore the larger water issues of the southwest as a whole. I know only enough about the subject to realize i'm an idiot when it comes to all this, but there's so much going on, and it all hinges on the Colorado River and proper water usage.

Also for reference because it really bothers me when people leave out comparisons, the Vegas Valley rainfall is cited as 4inches in the article and then compared to the national average of 38.

This is borderline intellectually dishonest in my opinion, since I'm not sure many people would realize that LA only has 16 inches of rain on average. Is it better than vegas? Absolutely, is it anywhere near the 38 being used for this comparison? Absolutely not. The entire southwest has a lot of issues they're going to eventually need to address, and I'm frankly much more worried about the 40 million in LA than the 2.2 in vegas.

Which is why nobody should be making sacrifices for Vegas. Yet here we are with another epic drought in SoCal, being asked to make all kinds of water cuts... again... while Vegas exists.

At least California grows a huge percentage of the nation's food. Vegas grows what? Fat asses and gambling debt?

You understand that if you delete vegas tomorrow you're still going to be making sacrifices. The demands california has are FAR beyond the amount allocated for vegas, and a lot of what's grown in california is a massive waste of water that really should be grown somewhere else.

I agree on the last point, but Vegas is a worthless cesspool that doesn't grow anything but silicone tits.

I ride my bike down Town Center and up the pedestrian Bridge every morning. It's super easy to get on from the road, not sure what this person's problem was in finding it. Also, on May 5th, 2022 the recorded high was a nice 91 degrees. This is not hot given the low humidity. I've been here five years and that 8 degree low has got to be an all time record low. Rarely will it get below freezing.

These are just a few examples of how the author bends the truth to there narrative, makes me wonder about the rest of the posts.

His bias is from a tourist's pov and the fact it's not easily accessible to an outsider.

> Without modern machinery and a national network keeping this place supplied with essentials there’s no way the current population of 2,200,000 people could survive in this environment. Las Vegas is basically a space colony.

Isn't that true of every large city? Is there any city of millions of people where you could put a wall around it and it would be self-sustaining? All cities rely on having food trucked in, use electricity mostly generated elsewhere, rely on water that comes from outside the city, etc...

I think “survive in this environment” is meant to reflect the fact that human beings could not exist for nontrivial periods in the Nevada Desert. Contrast that with San Diego or New York, where the environment is not actively trying to kill you during most of the year.

All cities import goods, because the economics favor it (space is at a premium). But most cities don’t exist in spite of their physical environs; they’re generally situated somewhere that’s advantageous to ordinary economic conduct (along rivers, lakes, coasts, etc.)

But even in San Diego, it seems there isn't enough freshwater to support a population nearly as large as the city has. From a quick search it looks like SD imports something like 80% of it's water.

I think Las Vegas is not really unique in this way, just a bit more extreme.

Well they get their water from the same source (Colorado River). The difference is that river is right next to Vegas, so it's not imported. San Diego pipes it 200 miles across the state.

The reason Vegas has such limited water is because California and Arizona have far more water rights. (Only 4% in fact) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact

> The reason Vegas has such limited water is because California and Arizona have far more water rights.

Which is a key reason why California needs to be sticking oodles of desalination plants along its absurdly long coastline yesterday. There is zero good reason why a top-10-in-the-world economy concentrated primarily on said absurdly long coastline should be dependent on water flowing from literal deserts.

If California's so averse to the requisite power requirements to make droughts a thing of the past (it's almost as if shutting down nuclear plants might have downstream effects), then there's ample opportunity for Nevada and Arizona to step up to the plate as literal powerhouses. On geothermal energy maps, Nevada in particular is a giant blob of heat; plus, I can think of no better place for sprawling solar farms than "inhospitable" deserts. Nevada/Arizona powers California, California hydrates Nevada/Arizona, win-win.

In New York the environment is most definitely trying to kill you. Spend a winter without heat to see what I mean.

We’ve just solved the “how to keep your house warm” problem a lot earlier than “how to keep it cool” so you don’t think of heating as spiting the environment, even though it is.

"Contrast that with San Diego or New York, where the environment is not actively trying to kill you during most of the year"

Las Vegas is inordinately hot only 3 months of the year. The rest of the time the weather is relatively mild. That's hardly "actively trying to kill you during most of the year". Many people who visit Las Vegas only do so during the summer, so it seems like it's hot most of the time to them, but this is a myth.

Having grown up in San Diego and currently living in Las Vegas, I'm not sure what special advantages you are implying it has that would enable it to be "advantageous to ordinary economic conduct" vs Las Vegas. It's next to an ocean full of water that you cannot drink (without expensive water treatment). Produce is grown in California (with water that it deprives Las Vegas of), but mostly not near San Diego, so it has to be transported in to support its massive population, just like it has to be to Las Vegas. In fact, the agricultural centers of California are approximately equidistant to both San Diego and Las Vegas, perhaps +/- 100 miles.

Even putting aside the other issues with California - overpopulation, insane politics, high crime rates, absurdly high state income tax, high cost of living, etc. - I don't see any serious advantage that Southern California in general has over Las Vegas, unless you just like the beach (and even then...it's a 3.5 hour drive or 30 minute flight to Southern California). In fact, many Californians are starting to realize this, and are invading us.

You're not the first one to point out that Southern California is a desert, and has to import water from elsewhere just to exist, e.g. "Chinatown."

However, the weather is way better than Vegas, and I'm not just talking about summer. A cold ocean has its advantages.

San Diego (and LA) are not deserts. That is a myth.

What's the average rainfall? [1]

OK, not technically a "desert." But definitely not enough rain to support the population it has.

[1] http://www.laalmanac.com/images3/chart_rainfall_LA_1887_2020...

However, the weather is way better than Vegas, and I'm not just talking about summer. A cold ocean has its advantages.

I grew up inland San Diego, and I can tell you that our summer days there routinely topped 100 degrees. I agree that if you are fortunate enough to live very close to the water, you do have some weather advantages over Vegas. For me, it's certainly not enough to warrant putting up with the other, man-made issues in California, even if I had a place right on the beach. But I agree that for some people, the (slightly) nicer weather is worth all of the expense and putting up with the nonsense.

That's true: inland, away from the marine influence, it's pretty hot. Even in the Bay Area, Antioch is way hotter than Mountain View.

The weather here is very simple: Low pressure == cool. High pressure == hot. Alternate.

Re: economic conduct: I was referring to the fact that San Diego is on the ocean and has a crucial shipping port. Las Vegas is traversed by a highway, but that highway could just as well be served by a small town (with a very large gas station).

Right. And San Diego and surroundings (e.g. Oceanside) have always had a huge military presence, mostly because it's on the water.

I know, I know: Area 51 and Nellis AFB.

Don't forget the railroad - which was one of the major reasons Vegas got started. That and there were a few natural artesian wells in the valley.

And as for highways, the information superhighway has a significant presence in Las Vegas too - Switch was the largest datacenter in the world for over five years and it's far from the only one here.

I didn’t read it like that because the author included the part about 2.2 million people. How long would the millions in New York or San Diego survive if their water and power and food deliveries were cut off?

I think “survive in this environment” is meant to reflect the fact that human beings could not exist for nontrivial periods in the Nevada Desert.

Native American tribes lived in the Nevada dessert for at least a thousand years. The Southern Paiute lived in the Las Vegas area.

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2015/jul/20/las-vegas-smallest-...

> the fact that human beings could not exist for nontrivial periods in the Nevada Desert

That ain't really a fact; native peoples have lived in said desert for thousands of years, and settlers for hundreds. The actual fact is that back in those days the population was small enough for the desert to support and flexible enough to adapt to said support.

Vegas in particular is situated "somewhere that's advantageous to ordinary economic conduct". So is Reno. That's indeed a big part of why they've been able to grow and stay grown (instead of collapsing as rapidly as they're established, like the average mining town). The problem is that the rivers supporting them (and the lakes/reservoirs supporting them) ain't infinite in capacity, not that they're entirely nonexistent.

Yes, but with Las Vegas it probably mostly also comes out of state, and a different region altogether. Of course a New York doesn’t sustain itself with regional farming. But basic produce probably won’t come from a very far away plac,

Nice to see some local photos. I bought my ebike at Las Vegas Cyclery.

It turns out that Vegas is getting a lot better with regard to water usage. Despite a big increase in population and new houses, usage has been trending down. https://lasvegassun.com/news/2019/sep/22/las-vegas-water-use...

I think most of the drain from Lake Mead is coming from California, which has been moving in the opposite direction. Also, Denver has been diverting more and more runoff from the Rockies to the East instead of West.

Plants don't provide "natural cooling". They naturally provide evaporator cooling. That is, they cool the surrounding area because they release water vapor. Drip irrigation is much better than other irrigation, but it doesn't change that growing trees and vines in the desert is wasteful.

But isn't the point of fighting desertifaction that since there is more shade, there's less evaporation and the little water that drops there accumulates in the soil supporting more vegetation and kicking off a virtuous cycle ? (I am no expert but that's what I assumed looking at counter-desertification projects)

Shade can be an important piece of it, but evapotranspiration (evaporation through the leaves) is responsible for 7-10 degrees of cooling in a normal environment. In a hot dry place probably even more.

I think this is one of those "if the whole area is green, you get great effects. But that doesn't mean planting a garden in the desert does the same thing."

The entire state of Nevada is allocated 4% of the water from the Colorado. Almost every residential property, and recently the commercial ones as well, is xeriscaped with rock. Yeah there are a few golf courses and hotel fountains which do as much water recycling as they can and look out of place in the desert, but Las Vegas is not particularly significant to the South West's water problems really.

For reference California takes 58% of the water. It's not even close to self sustaining and is HIDEOUSLY overpopulated in comparison to the resources it has available (especially when you consider the squandering of them on inappropriate agriculture).

Looking at all the parking lots, I can't help but wonder if there isn't a more appropriate form for this particular area?

In lots of places asphalt at least has the advantages of suppressing plants, making it easier to plow snow, avoiding any car fluids from seeping into the groundwater, keeping it from getting muddy in the rain, and so on. There's still issues with washboarding, and there is at least a little rain, but it feels like you could skip a lot of this built landscape.

I wonder how much the asphalt is, ultimately, aesthetic. It says "this is a built area" as opposed to "this is an empty lot".

LV is mostly gravel in its “natural state”. They even export the stuff. It’s really a lot like a naturally cleared plot of land with no uses outside of modern tech. (Modern tech includes a lot of water recycling and choosing plants suitable to the desert.)

Edit-I lived and worked there for 10 years. Ultimately it’s just too hot and dry for me. I like being outside too much and miss actual wild/green areas closer by. I saw it actively push out any business not gambling too. So pointing at the golf courses and casino tourist attractions as waste of water is probably a waste of time.

TLDR Las Vegas is Americas “Arrakis.” Complete with Fremen locals and probably a few Muad'Dibs it’s welcomed and ultimately rolled.

Now do the Bellagio fountains that evaporate 12 million gallons of ground water every year. I can't imagine that's being replenished at a sustainable rate.

https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11...

According to this, the fountains uses negligible amounts of water versus the population + visitors.

> Resort hotels’ water use accounts for only seven percent of the water supplied in Las Vegas.187 The average guest at a resort hotel uses sixty-three gallons of water per day. In comparison, the amount of water used by a Las Vegas resident is nearly double that amount.

The lake which the Bellagio fountains are part of is filled from a private well on the property. It does not pull from the mountain aquifers or from Lake Mead, but from a shallow and rather polluted aquifer underneath the Strip. That aquifer is primarily replenished from ground infiltration; Vegas does get rain, just not a lot of it, and there is still some irrigation which filters into the shallow aquifer. Because it's irrigation and turf runoff, and so shallow that there hasn't been sufficient filtering by soil layers, this aquifer is "salty" (various salts, not just NaCl) and not potable water. It is trapped by clay layers in the soil and does not refill the deeper aquifers or Lake Mead. So they are using that lower-quality groundwater for nonpotable use in the Bellagio lake and fountains.

The shallow aquifer is replenished at a sustainable rate, it's just not the high-quality mountain water in the deep aquifer. In fact, replenishment of the shallow aquifer has INCREASED with development - ironically for a desert, the water table would be high enough in parts of Las Vegas to require sump pumps if it wasn't for the shallow-aquifer wells that feed the fountains and golf courses. There is a very limited number, accounted for in existing water rights, of these intensive nonpotable water uses that the Las Vegas Valley can support, but those few play an important role in the overall water cycle.

Steve Wynn bought the Dunes to build the Bellagio because it had a natural artesian well (and associated water rights). There was a 9 hole golf course that got taken out with the demo of the Dunes.

Fountains use a LOT less water than golf courses!

> Most of the water actually flows under the stones and isn’t exposed directly to the sun in order to reduce evaporation.

Can somebody confirm this? it's not obvious to me that since the surface would be the same, that everything equal (average temperature of the water probably not?), the evaporation would be the less in this case vs normal stream.

This is great. Basic common sense, no nonsense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com