The
answer is yes.
Peak Oil, climate change - Phoenix Az., has no future
Could
Phoenix Soon Become Uninhabitable?
14
March, 2013
If
cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix.
Of
course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s thirteenth
largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million
people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and
windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s
largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends
on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and
dwindling) Colorado River.
In
Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What
couldn’t?
And
that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities,
which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to
magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s
a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring
large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban
disasters of our time—New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City
swamped by Sandy—may arise from single storms, but the damage they
do is the result of a chain reaction of failures—grids going down,
levees failing, back-up systems not backing up. As you might expect,
academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns:
infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use
it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time.
Phoenix’s
pyramid of complexities looks shakier than most because it stands
squarely in the crosshairs of climate change. The area, like much of
the rest of the American Southwest, is already hot and dry; it’s
getting ever hotter and drier, and is increasingly battered by
powerful storms. Sandy and Katrina previewed how coastal cities can
expect to fare as seas rise and storms strengthen. Phoenix pulls back
the curtain on the future of inland empires. If you want a taste of
the brutal new climate to come, the place to look is where that
climate is already harsh, and growing more so—the aptly named
Valley of the Sun.
In
Phoenix, it’s the convergence of heat, drought and violent winds,
interacting and amplifying each other that you worry about. Generally
speaking, in contemporary society, nothing that matters happens for
just one reason, and in Phoenix there are all too many “reasons”
primed to collaborate and produce big problems, with climate change
foremost among them, juicing up the heat, the drought and the wind to
ever greater extremes, like so many sluggers on steroids. Notably,
each of these nemeses, in its own way, has the potential to undermine
the sine qua non of modern urban life, the electrical grid, which in
Phoenix merits special attention.
If,
in summer, the grid there fails on a large scale and for a
significant period of time, the fallout will make the consequences of
Superstorm Sandy look mild. Sure, people will hunt madly for power
outlets to charge their cellphones and struggle to keep their milk
fresh, but communications and food refrigeration will not top their
list of priorities. Phoenix is an air-conditioned city. If the power
goes out, people fry.
In
the summer of 2003, a heat wave swept Europe and killed 70,000
people. The temperature in London touched 100 degrees Fahrenheit for
the first time since records had been kept, and in portions of France
the mercury climbed as high as 104. Those temperatures, however, are
child’s play in Phoenix, where readings commonly exceed 100 for
more than 100 days a year. In 2011, the city set a new record for
days over 110 degrees: there were 33 of them, more than a month of
spectacularly superheated days ushering in a new era.
In
Flight From the Sun
It
goes without saying that Phoenix’s desert setting is hot by nature,
but we’ve made it hotter. The city is a masonry world, with asphalt
and concrete everywhere. The hard, heavy materials of its buildings
and roads absorb heat efficiently and give it back more slowly than
the naked land. In a sense, the whole city is really a thermal
battery, soaking up energy by day and releasing it at night. The
result is an “urban heat island,” which, in turn, prevents the
cool of the desert night from providing much relief.
Sixty
years ago, when Phoenix was just embarking on its career of manic
growth, nighttime lows never crept above ninety. Today such
temperatures are a commonplace, and the vigil has begun for the first
night that doesn’t dip below 100. Studies indicate that Phoenix’s
urban-heat-island effect may boost nighttime temperatures by as much
as ten degrees. It’s as though the city has doubled down on climate
change, finding a way to magnify its most unwanted effects even
before it hits the rest of us full blast.
Predictably,
the poor suffer most from the heat. They live in the hottest
neighborhoods with the least greenery to mitigate the heat-island
effect, and they possess the least resources for combatting high
temperatures. For most Phoenicians, however, none of this is more
than an inconvenience as long as the AC keeps humming and the utility
bill gets paid. When the heat intensifies, they learn to scurry from
building to car and into the next building, essentially holding their
breaths. In those cars, the second thing they touch after the
ignition is the fan control for the AC. The steering wheel comes
later.
In
the blazing brilliance of July and August, you venture out undefended
to walk or run only in the half-light of dawn or dusk. The idea for
residents of the Valley of the Sun is to learn to dodge the heat, not
challenge it.
Heat,
however, is a tricky adversary. It stresses everything, including
electrical equipment. Transformers, when they get too hot, can fail.
Likewise, thermoelectric generating stations, whether fired by coal,
gas, or neutrons, become less efficient as the mercury soars. And the
great hydroelectric dams of the Colorado River, including Glen
Canyon, which serves greater Phoenix, won’t be able to supply the
“peaking power” they do now if the reservoirs behind them are
fatally shrunken by drought, as multiple studies forecast they will
be. Much of this can be mitigated with upgraded equipment, smart grid
technologies, and redundant systems. But then along comes the haboob.
A
haboob is a dust/sand/windstorm, usually caused by the collapse of a
thunderstorm cell. The plunging air hits the ground and roils
outward, picking up debris across the open desert. As the Arabic name
suggests, such storms are native to arid regions, but—although
Phoenix is no stranger to storm-driven dust—the term haboob has
only lately entered the local lexicon. It seems to have been imported
to describe a new class of storms, spectacular in their vehemence,
which bring visibility to zero and life to a standstill. They
sandblast cars, close the airport and occasionally cause the
lights—and AC—to go out. Not to worry, say the two major
utilities serving the Phoenix metroplex, Arizona Public Service and
the Salt River Project. And the outages have indeed been brief. So
far.
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Before
Katrina hit, the Army Corps of Engineers was similarly reassuring to
the people of New Orleans. And until Superstorm Sandy landed, almost
no one worried about storm surges filling the subway tunnels of New
York.
Every
system, like every city, has its vulnerabilities. Climate change, in
almost every instance, will worsen them. The beefed-up, juiced-up,
greenhouse-gassed, overheated weather of the future will give us
haboobs of a sort we can’t yet imagine, packed with ever greater
amounts of energy. In all likelihood, the emergence of such storms as
a feature of Phoenix life results from an overheating environment,
abetted by the loose sand and dust of abandoned farmland (which dried
up when water was diverted to the city’s growing subdivisions).
Water,
Water, Everywhere (But Not for Long)
In
dystopic portraits of Phoenix’s unsustainable future, water—or
rather the lack of it—is usually painted as the agent of collapse.
Indeed, the metropolitan area, a jumble of jurisdictions that
includes Scottsdale, Glendale, Tempe, Mesa, Sun City, Chandler and
fifteen other municipalities, long ago made full use of such local
rivers as the Salt, Verde and Gila. Next, people sank wells and mined
enough groundwater to lower the water table by 400 feet.
Sometimes
the land sank, too. Near some wells it subsided by ten feet or more.
All along, everyone knew that the furious extraction of groundwater
couldn’t last, so they fixed their hopes on a new bonanza called
the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a river-sized, open-air canal
supported by an elaborate array of pumps, siphons, and tunnels that
would bring Colorado River water across the breadth of Arizona to
Phoenix and Tucson.
The
CAP came on line in the early 1990s and today is the engine of
Arizona’s growth. Unfortunately, in order to win authorization and
funding to build it, state officials had to make a bargain with the
devil, which in this case turned out to be California. Arizona’s
delegation in the House of Representatives was tiny, California’s
was huge, and its representatives jealously protected their
longstanding stranglehold on the Colorado River. The concession
California forced on Arizona was simple: it had to agree that its CAP
water rights would take second place to California’s claims.
This
means one thing: once the inevitable day comes when there isn’t
enough water to go around, the CAP will absorb the shortage down to
the last drop before California even begins to turn off its faucets.
A
raw deal for Arizona? You bet, but not exactly the end of the line.
Arizona has other “more senior” rights to the Colorado, and when
the CAP begins to run dry, you may be sure that the masters of the
CAP will pay whatever is necessary to lease those older rights and
keep the 330-mile canal flowing. Among their targets will be water
rights belonging to Indian tribes at the western edge of the state
along the lower reaches of the river. The cost of buying tribal water
will drive the rates consumers pay for water in Phoenix sky-high, but
they’ll pay it because they’ll have to.
Longer
term, the Colorado River poses issues that no amount of tribal water
can resolve. Beset by climate change, overuse, and drought, the river
and its reservoirs, according to various researchers, may decline to
the point that water fails to pass Hoover Dam. In that case, the CAP
would dry up, but so would the Colorado Aqueduct which serves greater
Los Angeles and San Diego, as well as the All-American Canal, on
which the factory farms of California’s Imperial and Coachella
valleys depend. Irrigators and municipalities downstream in Mexico
would also go dry. If nothing changes in the current order of things,
it is expected that the possibility of such a debacle could loom in
little more than a decade.
The
preferred solution to this crisis among the water mavens of the lower
Colorado is augmentation, which means importing more water into the
Colorado system to boost native supplies. A recently discussed
grandiose scheme to bail out the Colorado’s users with a pipeline
from the Mississippi River failed to pass the straight-face test and
was shot down by then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar.
Meanwhile,
the obvious expedient of cutting back on water consumption finds
little support in thirsty California, which will watch the CAP go dry
before it gets serious about meaningful system-wide conservation.
Burning
Uplands
Phoenicians
who want to escape water worries, heat waves and haboobs have
traditionally sought refuge in the cool green forests of Arizona’s
uplands, or at least they did until recently. In 2002, the
Rodeo-Chediski fire consumed 469,000 acres of pine and mixed conifer
on the Mogollon Rim, not far from Phoenix. It was an ecological
holocaust that no one expected to see surpassed. Only nine years
later, in 2011, the Wallow fire picked up the torch, so to speak, and
burned across the Rim all the way to the New Mexico border and
beyond, topping out at 538,000 charred acres.
Now,
nobody thinks such fires are one-off flukes. Diligent modeling of
forest response to rising temperatures and increased moisture stress
suggests, in fact, that these two fires were harbingers of worse to
come. By mid-century, according to a paper by an A-team of
Southwestern forest ecologists, the “normal” stress on trees will
equal that of the worst megadroughts in the region’s distant
paleo-history, when most of the trees in the area simply died.
Compared
to Phoenix’s other heat and water woes, the demise of Arizona’s
forests may seem like a side issue, whose effects would be noticeable
mainly in the siltation of reservoirs and the destabilization of the
watersheds on which the city depends. But it could well prove a
regional disaster. Consider, then, heat, drought, windstorms and fire
as the four horsemen of Phoenix’s Apocalypse. As it happens,
though, this potential apocalypse has a fifth horseman as well.
Rebecca
Solnit has written eloquently of the way a sudden catastrophe—an
earthquake, hurricane or tornado—can dissolve social divisions and
cause a community to cohere, bringing out the best in its citizenry.
Drought and heat waves are different. You don’t know that they have
taken hold until you are already in them, and you never know when
they will end. The unpleasantness eats away at you. It corrodes your
state of mind. You have lots of time to meditate on the deficiencies
of your neighbors, which loom larger the longer the crisis goes on.
Drought
divides people, and Phoenix is already a divided place—notoriously
so, thanks to the brutal antics of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe
Arpaio. In Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable
City, Andrew Ross offers a dismal portrait of contemporary Phoenix—of
a city threatened by its particular brand of local politics and
economic domination, shaped by more than the usual quotient of
prejudice, greed, class insularity and devotion to raw power.
It
is a truism that communities that do not pull together fail to
surmount their challenges. Phoenix’s are as daunting as any faced
by an American city in the new age of climate change, but its
winner-take-all politics (out of which has come Arizona’s
flagrantly repressive anti-immigration law), combined with the
fragmentation of the metro-area into nearly two dozen competing
jurisdictions, essentially guarantee that, when the worst of times
hit, common action and shared sacrifice will remain as insubstantial
as a desert mirage. When one day the U-Haul vans all point away from
town and the people of the Valley of the Sun clog the interstates
heading for greener, wetter pastures, more than the brutal heat of a
new climate paradigm will be driving them away. The breakdown of
cooperation and connectedness will spur them along, too.
One
day, some of them may look back and think of the real estate crash of
2007-2008 and the recession that followed with fond nostalgia. The
city’s economy was in the tank, growth had stalled and for a while
business-as-usual had nothing usual about it. But there was a rare
kind of potential. That recession might have been the last best
chance for Phoenix and other go-go Sunbelt cities to reassess their
lamentably unsustainable habits and re-organize themselves,
politically and economically, to get ready for life on the front
burner of climate change. Land use, transportation, water policies,
building codes, growth management—you name it—might all have
experienced a healthy overhaul. It was a chance no one took. Instead,
one or several decades from now, people will bet on a surer thing:
they’ll take the road out of town.
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