I know I could go back through the archives to show that growing pot is rather water intensive, uses a lot of energy, and can pollute from different pesticides and such. Of course, those mostly have nothing to do with the climate scam, but, environmental and infrustructre. Here’s the WP
Growing weed takes more energy than mining bitcoin. Can it go green?
In 2010, an energy researcher named Evan Mills was surprised to walk into a plant nursery near his Mendocino, California, home and find, among the seedlings and bags of soil, a display of gigantic 1,000-watt lightbulbs — a more powerful version of bulbs commonly used to light highways at night.
He asked the nursery owner what they were for. “He gave me kind of a side eye and then explained, ‘Well, this is for cannabis growing, you idiot. That’s what everyone around here does,’” Mills said.
The federal government rarely funds research on marijuana — a substance it officially ranks as more dangerous than fentanyl, cocaine and meth — let alone its energy use. So Mills, then a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spent nights and weekends outside of work on a years-long quest to build what many growers, regulators and researchers consider the most complete model of the energy it takes to power the American cannabis industry.
Wait, we’re actually paying people via the federal government to do research? You can’t tell me it was all on his dime.
What he found — after interviewing grow-light sellers, reading trade journals and equipment manuals, poring over crop-yields analyses and case studies of growers’ energy use, and scouring law enforcement reports — is that together, legal and illegal cannabis growers use about 1 percent of all American energy. That’s more than cryptocurrency mining or all other crops combined, according to a paper Mills published in February, an update to his original 2012 study.
OK, it’s 13 years later: why does the WP care? Don’t they have other things to write about?
The industry’s greenhouse pollution warms the planet about as much as 10 million cars do. For a daily user who buys cannabis grown indoors, their pot’s carbon footprint is nearly half the carbon footprint of their entire home, according to Mills.
“Consumers don’t know any of this,” he said. “They know that a car is labeled with how many miles per gallon it gets, or a refrigerator has an Energy Star label, but there’s zero consumer information about cannabis.”
Do consumers care? Heck, how many Warmists are getting high all the time? Are casual users, meaning they hit the vape pens all the time? Or gummies? Or something?
But the obvious solution is far from easy. Businesses are reluctant to give up indoor farms that can churn out six or more harvests a year with precise potency just to start over in outdoor fields that may only manage one or two harvests a year. Outdoor fields must also contend with weather and wild pollinators that make their product less predictable.
So, there must be solutions. In this incredibly long article, they do give some things that growers can do (which would cost money), before getting to
In 2014, two years after Colorado legalized marijuana, Boulder tacked a 2-cents-per-kilowatt-hour fee onto cannabis companies’ electricity bills. It used the money to hire energy efficiency consultants to suggest ways to save power and to buy energy monitoring equipment used to inspect grow houses. Later, growers that paid for upgrades got a break on their energy fees.
Damned if they do damned if they don’t.
“It’s another looming energy issue,” said Mills. “Cannabis right now is the dominant part. But if the proponents of indoor agriculture got their way, it would be overshadowed gradually by all these other crops.”
Obviously, the only solution is Government regulation.
Ridiculous story. Weed is a plant. It grows outside without any energy at all. People only used grow lights to grow it in their basements and avoid law enforcement.
Sure it was, thus proving that when someone really cares about something, they invest their own resources into it. The gamming community has thousands of people who devotes thousands of hours creating and distributing mods as well as statistical analysis to describe game mechanics. All for no pay simply because it amuses them. It is a very short dotted line between the focus of his research and his own “hobby” of growing weed for his own use. He was just using the “just doing academic research” line in case he got busted.
The problem isn’t the environmental effects of growing pot; the problem is the increasing legalization and toleration of yet another intoxicant. Why do we need another way for people to f(ornicate) up their brains?
One of the saddest things for our country was when the Eighteenth Amendment failed and had to be repealed.
I’ve said it before: if God gave me his power to change one thing about the world, I would use it to make the human brain completely immune to the effects of drugs and alcohol.
It’s too bad God himself disagrees with you.
“Go, eat with joy thy bread, and drink with a glad heart thy wine, for already hath God been pleased with thy works.” Ecclesiastes 9:7.
It’s sad when people talk about God without the faintest inkling of what God himself has said. Maybe you should stop offering opinions on something until becoming a bit more knowledgeable about it.
Letme,
It is obvious that Mr. Dana is commenting on the evils that intoxication and drug use have wrought, not dinner out with friends. The Bible consistently speaks against drunkenness and lack of self control. The author of Ecclesiastes is unknown but we can say with certainty that it was not God. There is no mention that “God himself told us to drink wine”. Do not talk of “faintest inklings” when you put words into God’s mouth unless you claim to be a prophet.
By matter of historical fact, all of the 66 books in the Bible are believed to be, at the very least, divinely inspired…if you would care to disprove this, I’d be happy to take what you have to say into consideration.
By matter of historical fact, all of the 66 books in the Bible are believed to be, at the very least, divinely inspired…if you would care to disprove this, I’d be happy to take what you have to say into consideration.
BTW, Ecclesiastes was written by King Solomon. To say the author is unknown is quite disingenuous.
Divinely inspired != “God Himself Saying it”. Solomon was not God and never claimed to be a prophet. Some of the books are historical. Some are the records of the government. Some, like ecclesiastics, are poetry and wisdom. Solomon also had “many wives” and yet stole another man’s wife. The Bible tells us the story of that but does not recommend we all do likewise.
The authorship of Ecclesiastes by Tradition goes to Solomon but some scholars dispute this. You can google it “Who wrote Ecclesiastes”. I’ll wait.
Unless you are visiting the Temple every year to sacrifice animals, stop being a bonehead about scriptural purity. You should have stuck with Paul telling Timothy to have some wine for his stomach.
There is nothing disingenuous about me telling you something I actually believe. That’s not what that word means.
Prof. Be careful the guy could be Fat Jeff. Voice is the same.
Most folks I know grow a couple plants just like they do tomatoes or zucchini plants. It is legal here to grow and is just like any other plant in the garden.
Right. Because weed is just like tomatoes. I don’t know anyone who grows or uses weed. Reminds me that Tobacco use is still legal in the USA. Funny how the government claims to have an FDA to keep food and drugs safe, yet they do nothing about tobacco and the same state governments that claimed irreparable harm (that could be repaired by a piece of the action from billions of tobacco dollars) are falling all over themselves to legalize weed.
Hillaryous!!!
Newsflash! The EPA doesn’t prevent or reduce pollution either…
They sell permits to make the pollution LEGAL, and to mitigate liability to the polluter…
The problem we have in my area of Northern California are the giant outdoor grows, tens of thousands of plants. They are Cartel grows that use banned pesticides that run off into drinking water, diversion of creeks for watering, killing of wildlife, mainly deer and the danger of booby traps and armed confrontation with others who go to the mountains for recreation.