You may be right that AZ isn’t using up its Colorado River allocation yet, but that is because CA is using it up for them. They have been told to cut back, and are trying, but…

I do think that Phoenix and environs would do better and be a better place to live if they would just cut back on water usage. I find Carefree/Cave Creek much nicer because of the lower humidity. It just doesn’t make sense to have so many lawns in the middle of the desert (and did someone mention golf courses?) When I worked there, I worked with a lot of people who had been there most of their lives, and they all seemed to have noticed a significant rise in the humidity – and as noted, that doesn’t come from the desert surrounding Phoenix.

But I happily moved from Austin, TX to Phoenix, AZ (actually, initially to Glendale, which is just west of the city of Phoenix). Yes, the heat is intense for four or so months a year. But everyone has airconditioning, and it isn’t that bad. I should note that Las Vegas, growing even faster, is withing a degree or two of being as hot, but has winds that in the summer make it unlivable, as compared to Phoenix.

Indeed, I find living around Denver, w/o air conditioning, harder than living around Phoenix with air conditioning.

Next, there is a huge difference numerically between the Phoenix metro area and the city of Phoenix. I spent most of my time in Phoenix working along I-17, which is west Phoenix (city), and then ultimately living in north central Phoenix. But I rarely got further east than mid-Scottsdale. Then, when I closed on my house, I had to drive to the closing, which turned out to be on the east side of the metro area. It took me almost an hour to drive from my credit union on the very eastern edge of the city along AZ 202, to the closing. The metro area is huge now.

Finally, why would someone want to move from the Rust Belt to Phoenix? Besides the change in attitude, what they don’t have that the Rust Belt has is Winter. I love the winters here in CO. But my mother grew up in Chicago, and always thought that our winters here were mild. She is one of many I have known from the north-eastern mid-west who couldn’t wait to get out of the brutal cold you find there in the winters.

So, what you are trading is hot and muggy in the summers and brutally cold and humid in the winters for very pleasant in the winters and very hot, but relatively dry in the summers (alleviated to a great extent by air conditioning). My vote is AZ every day.

Like you, I had a higher water bill in Stow, OH (between Akron and Cleveland) than I do here in Chandler.

Now, it’s a cheap shot to say the Cuyahoga River “caught fire”. Actually, there was a fuel oil spill on the river and the spilled fuel burned. Yes, the river and Lake Erie was a mess in the late 60s but so were the Cleveland Indians. Both have improved dramatically since. Don’t forget, the Indians got “snowed out” of their home opener this year, for 4 days straight in early April. Must be global warming, oops, climate change.

This article is more “global warming”, class envy nonsense. I had a good laugh at it. That’s all it is, a joke! I travel to Northeast Ohio on business often and it feels like a dying, “ghost town” there every time compared to the dynamism of Phoenix.

And, it seems to me that if there truly is a shortage of water, food, arable land, and the like, then we ought to have people live in areas like the Sonoran Desert and save the fertile, moist Midwest for agriculture. A lot more water is used in AZ for agriculture than for residential and commercial needs.

I’ll cheerfully take 3 months of heat here and 9 months of quite decent weather, with plentiful sunshine, over nice summers in Ohio and 9 months of clouds / rain / sleet / snow / slush, etc. in Cleveland. No contest. I tell people I’m not tough enough to live there any more. About 1 week at a time is all I can take!

Murray Whyte may be a nobody or a liberal star (excuse my ignorance of him), but his comments deserved the expert skewering of Coyote Blog. With people like Whyte, wealth is always static to be shared equally, people never make rational choices and need the educated to dictate what is best for them and last, but not least, golf courses are an abomination. This last assumption of Whyte’s deserves universal scorn.

But just so I get this straight…. we are supposed to allow unfettered access by illegal aliens but the citizens of the country are expected to apply to the government if they want to move to a different city?

And how is desalination a “hare-brained” idea when the commenter notes in the next breath that it may be technologically possible.

Six months inside during summer??? I don’t think so. I don’t feel stuck inside during the warm months of June, July, and August. Maybe you’ve been listening to those California whiners. Come into town. Jack up housing prices. Then complain about the heat.

Wait… think about this. The article appears in the Toronto Star. His audience is in the Great Lakes. While I am not disagreeing with your overall points (in fact the post is great, as was the one back in April), you must realize that the cities around the Great Lakes identify with the lakes and with one another. Anything that could have a big impact on the lakes from the American side is obviously something that Toronto residents would like to be aware of.

Murray Whyte is a staff reporter for a newspaper, and he has to earn his living. He’s not a climatologist, an economist, or any other shade of scientist. Plain and simple, that’s why.

And who the hell ever suggested sending water from the Great Lakes to Phoenix?

It’s not like this is a new concept. An unjustified fear, perhaps, but not new. This is why it’s in the news right now. And there are people trying to pump water from the lakes into the Mississippi Basin (see this article). This causes those pesky slippery slope fears in the uneducated. Maybe nobody in Phoenix has made this suggestion, but the difference between New Berlin, WI and Phoenix is just one of degree, right? /sarcasm

What I think this issue really needs is some bad puns. I mean, this Great Lakes Compact could be a watershed moment in American nationalist federalism.

As our host says, most water issues are greatly exacerbated by subsidies from federal taxes resulting in far below market prices to water users. He says Phoenix water costs for a household are $17/month. How much do sewage costs add to that? I’m paying $130 a quarter for water + sewage in Manton, Michigan, a small town with a plentiful water supply running right through it’s middle; 50 years ago, that river also powered the town electric plant.

However, I’m pretty sure that, “These are cities that still use the Great Lakes as a toilet, dumping tons of raw sewage out in the lakes every day” hasn’t been true for over thirty years. Nixon created the EPA, and such cities were their first target. There still is an appreciable amount of industrial emissions that can’t be filtered from the waste-water, and occasionally some city sewage system floods out and raw sewage floats out to the lakes, but the main water problem now is all the crap that’s on the lake and river bottoms from before they put any controls on emissions at all.

1. Outsourcing to Mexico and China, which started decades ago with baby steps to the South. Where land was cheaper, unions less powerful, and the corruption-fed cost of living was not as high (means operating costs lower).

2. Liberal-PC-multi-culti public safety policies led to pandering to various minority groups. Whites working and middle class fled. Not liking being crime victims.

3. Increased control by various ethnic groups led to corrupt machine politics, and with cheap land elsewhere and mobile capital, new business formation went elsewhere and existing businesses moved or expanded elsewhere.

4. Increased international competition destroyed company towns: Buffalo was dependent on Xerox and Kodak, Detroit on the Big 3, and Pittsburgh on US Steel. All of which faced huge foreign competitors like Fuji or Toyota or Mitsubishi who ate the US companies lunch.

5. Increased corruption (see #3) led to higher and higher taxes, with land constrained around bodies of water (cities can only grow so much). Leading to escalating housing prices in the few nice (read: white-middle class) areas free of crime. Cities like Phoenix or Dallas can expand 360 degrees. Not so say Chicago, constrained by Lake Michigan.

None of these factors has any relevance to the weather. It’s mostly about social mobility following capital and business mobility. People moved to where the jobs were. The jobs moved there because costs were lower, particularly corruption, public safety, and housing-cost-of-living. Cleveland could in theory offer businesses and people a better deal, but they’d have to compete on things that matter (weather generally doesn’t):

*Public safety … i.e. low crime through vigorous policing and sentencing.
*Low cost / High quality housing.
*Business friendly economies.