Posted by Snow in 
Petropolitics aside, the broad desert spans of Nevada could be soaking up solar energy in record waves. The old saying what happens in Las Vegas stays in Vegas is never more untrue than in the waste disposal analysis and energy consumption of this desert oasis of sustainability reason.
Green is hardly the word conjured up in a context of Las Vegas, unless the symbol is one of money. All thise lights cost money, and resources. Las Vegas is the defining city gestalt of the phrase “when crowded meets flat”.
Petrodollars and Communist governments don’t drive Vegas, consumerism does. When the travel market falls flat and no more piggy bank home mortgage bucks can b wrung from the piggy bank HELOC, what will happen to the towers of Las Vegas?
And the artifically sustained areas that have grown up between Las Vegas and its environs have little industry, most subsist on an ecology of gambling. Eben the hospitality arm is supported by the mainstay one armed bandits andindoor fields of felt. China not so much.
China’s growth has effected manhole shortage in Chicago due to manhole pilfering for smelting overseas. Scotland missed so many manholes ina few days they termed in the “Great Drain Robbery”.
This twisted helixical pair of gambing and entertainment/hospitality are as far from organic and local consumption of goods and services as is humanly possible. Runaway growth has elft Las Vegas a tourist deluxe destination in a lingering recession era with bankruptcy, foreclosure headlines and bank and stock failure the daily headlines.
Frankly,with online gambling it’s unlikely that a desert trip to the versus former tumbleweed capital is a true destination of most people next to beaches and tropical islands.
Friedman describes the Venetian casino in Macau, which needed 20,000 construction workers and 3 meter sheets of gold leaf. Macau is owned by China, a nation of near-starving people living well below the poverty level in the billions. Birth rates and death rates are so out of balance a proscription against more than one or two children is legally enforced.
That’s why the casinos throw in so many incentives. These are encouragements to watch a 50 foot Jumbotron inside a brightly lit casino full of machines while the sun shines outside.
The ecology of capitalism that is Las Vegas has an ethical undertow contrary to sustainable living. Most of what is spent in Las Vegas has little real monetary return. Gamblinf, recreation, entertainment, dining, these things are high priced consumerism at its worst.
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