Hat Tip to Atrios for pointing to this article in The Nation on Saturday: Could Phoenix Soon Become Uninhabitable? William deBuys looks at the combination of factors that may render Phoenix, AZ unviable.
...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.
Limited water supplies, ever rising temperatures, a power grid becoming more stressed, haboobs, brush fires, dysfunctional government, lack of coordinated planning…
Read the whole thing.