Marijuana causes global warming, uses 1% of U.S. electricity

wow, that seems far fetched.

 

This implies we should legalize growing pot *outdoors* to consume the excess CO2 in the atmosphere to solve the global warming problem in one step.

 

"In California, some 400,000 authorized growers use about 3 percent of the state’s electricity for their business."

This is astounding.
I wonder how much energy do the unauthorized growers use?

​

 

The only reason its grown indoors is because its illegal.What an enormous waste of resources.
Grow it outdoors and when its burnt its neutral.
That wont solve global warming,but maybe if the doomers smoked more pot they would be less paranoid.

 

Could be, I guess. depends on what fraction of these growers are using "the big lights'.

Another source for the quantities involved:

Mass of US Marijuana Production

suggesting domestic production is 2500 tons, with 6000 more tons imported. Assuming this is accurate, we can add 4600 tons CO2 from (dometic) burning, which further assumes that the entire plant weight is burned. The article's author wondered about that... Yet if the article was written by a 'carbon thinker', he would have realized that this merely balances the plants' photosynthetic C uptake. Net =zero there.

Anyway it is a high profit margin crop, so the electricity bills may not weigh heavily on the producers.

Were it legal, then the growers could move outdoors and avoid the electricity CO2. Just sayin'. The laws being as they are, total marijuana related arrests in 2009 were about 858,000.

Marijuana | Drug War Facts

Which presumably required some vehicle fuel and electricity use by law enforcement. So yes, energy-intensive businesses have big carbon footprints.

Is 'growing' an energy-intensive industry? not if we follow the EIA:

EIA - Industrial Sector Energy Demand: Revisions for Non-Energy-Intensive Manufacturing

and use $35 billion as the annual value of the US crop

The Cost of Marijuana Prohibition - Marijuana Legalization Organization - The Economic effects of Cannabis Prohibition and Regulation

But EIA mentions food as energy intensive, so cheetos probably qualify.

 

+ 1

 

The Buds are the commercial value.
Wild guess.
Thats probably 1/100th of one percent of the weight of the entire plant.

 

Maybe it would be more effective to tackle the other 99% first? Just a thought, man. :smokin: :madgrin:

 

Now that is a idiotic statement. I don't know too many pot smokers these days (except a couple of legit medical users) but to equate pot and liberalism is just plain silly,, and disingenuous to both liberals and pot heads!

 

R

Not necessarily; it depends on the climate. Your statement would be more true in a hot climate like Vietnam, Jamaica, or Southern California. As long as you can find some water, you're good to grow. Here in BC, we've got an abundance of water, but a serious lack of sunshine. Without grow lights, you'd get one weak and probably mouldy crop per year.

Not such a bad thought. For a second thought, that 1% of electricity produces a crop worth $35 billion. On top of that, think how much taxpayer's money would be saved by not housing whatever percentage of the prison population is in for the crime of smoking a joint. And then, think of the taxes that would be earned on the legal sales and the business income. We can't afford NOT to legalise it.

 

Gottal hand it to Octane. Knows how to select among too many news stories to pick ones that will get some churn going at PC.

Me just the opposite. Look at data, try to figure out meaningful patterns, conclusions. Boring, man. Total buzkill.

Lately here, hyo, if you can't 'grow' outdoors in BC you are looking at the wrong microclimates. I quite doubt that most of the Canada crop exported to the US is grown indoors. If it is, label it 'hydropower weed' and just watch those profits increase.

Also I think that the US can afford not to legalize Cannabis, but that it would need to look at other revenue streams. I mean. $35 billion (pot-rev) is not enough to fix things. Rich-individual-tax-wise and rich-company-tax-wise. Look at the investment value of foreign wars. Potential candidates (Trump) have the luxury of doing the latter, being non incumbents. Lucky them!

US would further improve its financials by making more things that other countries wish to buy. Yes I know that includes weapons, but thinking more along the lines of energy technology. In the longer term, decide whether it's smart to defund education. Don't ask me; just decide.

Current legals prevent US from being a Cannabis exporter, so just let that one go.

Back to Octane, hoping he or she will give the pot another stir.

 

It's funny... the knots some people will twist themselves into to justify prohibition.

I don't think there's any other comparable issue in American politics where all of the standard talking points go right out the window ("personal freedom", "it's my body", "big government", etc..).

 

I want whatever you're smoking, Octane. Thanks for sharing.

 

I wonder how much electricity is used to produce alcohol or cigarettes? We'll never know because the government gets paid nicely for these legal products. This point to ponder brought to you by a non-pot-smoking lefty.

 

Nice study. 17 million metric tons of C02.

Let's do the same for beer, see where these vices stand relative to one another.

US beer consumption, 206 million barrels
[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_in_the_United_States"]Beer in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

Convert that to six-packs of 12 oz cans.
31 gallons in a US barrel
A six pack is .56 gallons, or, inverting, 1.8 (rounded) six-packs per gallon.

So that's 206x10^6 x 31 x 1.8 = 11.4 x 10^9 six packs,

Or, in English, 11 billion six-packs.

That works out to about one can of beer per day per adult in the US. Teetotalers should keep in mind that the 5% or so of the adult population that is alcoholics consumes over half the alcohol, so that's an average that largely reflects the habits of a minority of heavy drinkers. At any rate, that seems plausible. Run with that.

Fat Tire Ale reports 3.2 kg C02/six pack:
www.stanford.edu/~sjdavis/NBB-FT.pdf

They appear to be trying to minimize footprint, so that should be a reasonable number for taking a lower bound.

Multiplying, and taking 1000 KG = a metric ton, I get 36 million metric tons C02, for US beer consumption. Or roughly twice as much GHG from beer-drinkers as from pot-smokers.

Of course, the interesting policy question is, if you could convert your typical alcoholic into a pothead, would that increase or reduce GHG emissions? (And by that I mean convert from one drug to the other.) My BOTE says it would likely raise GHGs. If, as I stated without proof, alcoholics are responsible for about half of alcohol consumption, and as stated 5% of adult population (versus the 6% of adult population cited as pot users in that study), then there's about as many alcoholics as potheads, and the GHG from alcohol consumption of alcoholics is roughly the same as the GHG from production of pot total. So if the average alcholic could get by on just the average pot consumption in that study (which, based on the weight of a tobacco cigarette, I calculate as 2 joints/day/smoker), then it would be a wash. But if alcoholics required above-average amounts of pot, converting alcoholics to pot heads would raise GHG emissions.

So on a per-addict basis, I'm guessing pot has a larger carbon footprint. But in total, less.

Anybody want to do an estimate for coffee and tea?

I suspect but can't prove that the GHG footprint of tobacco is pretty small. And at any rate, I couldn't find any numbers. The only reason the beer number was there was that the company had significant concern about environmental issues. Doesn't seem likely I'll find a similarly-motivated tobacco marketer.

 

This assumes the products are substitutes, which denies Franklin "beer is proof god loves us", and gets into religion. I suppose you can propose a Mormon theocracy with shira law, but really is religious freedom a price we want to pay for less carbon savings than more efficient air conditioning?

Then again why does our government want to outlaw a medically useful drug because some use it improperly according to some others. And I believe the rastas also use it for religious purposes.

But using better logic don't non-drinking registered democrats produce 400x the carbon footprint than alcoholic republicans. Most statistics are made up on the spot, but IMHO this is more accurate than assuming a 1% drop in CO2 production by stopping all grow lights for production of marijuana.. Would these customers use more or less power if they didn't get high? I wonder if I can get a grant to study that