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

The reason pot is grown indoors is to wildly increase the THC content by controlling the lighting and humidity very precisely. The THC in this kind of "product" can reach 35%, much higher than what can be achieve growing outdoors.

 

Don't bogert that joint my friend, pass it over to me....

 

Coffee, tea, and cocoa are listed in one source at 8 kg C02 per Kg of product, though I suspect that the estimates for these would vary widely.

http://go.telegraph.co.uk/?id=296X4...mate_Change_and_Food_Report__28_Sept_2010.pdf

US consumption of coffee, tea, and cocoa, I calculate at 2.5 million metric tons, based on this USDA source:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...sg=AFQjCNHzBPlkLayqg1qXvELODil7A-UrcA&cad=rja

Sorry for the sloppy links, not worth cleaning them up.

So, 2.5 x 8 = 20 million metric tons of C02 emissions from US coffee/tea/cocoa consumption -- more than pot, less than beer. But same ballpark.

 

I can't find anything on raw numbers, but percent changes, but my impress was it was somewhere around 2 billion tonnes/yr.

 

Oh, sorry, I should have said that I downloaded the original study. That's where the 17M came from. If that's 1%, the 20M is just over 1%.

Want to do it the hard way?

US electrical generation produced 2,269 million metric tons of C02 in 2009:
Electric Power Annual - Summary Statistics for the United States

Which, now that I look, is just about exactly what Tripp just said, 2 billion being 2000 million, at least in the US.

So 20M would account for just under 1%, and the original 17M from pot production is even a hair further under 1% -- but both round to 1%. Technically, 0.88% and 0.75%, respectively.

I'm not saying this used US electrical energy, I'm saying the emissions are equivalent to that much average US electrical production.

It is possible that the author went to the trouble of weighting it by the states where the pot is produced, in which case the less-carbon-intensive West Coast grid would be a factor in his calculation (but not mine, since I'm using the US average.) So he didn't necessarily cheat by rounding to 1% -- could be it is 1%.

 

Take the big view: each year the world releases more than 30 billion (30 thousand million) tonnes of fossil-derived CO2. 17 million tonnes of CO2 released in support of marijuana production is utterly negligible.

 

Wow, dude...

 

Had an interesting discussion with a DEA fellow about that. Was an interesting conversation.

 

You can also help reduce the CO2 by not exhaling the stuff...

 

C'mon zen, we went over that already. Burning 'current' photosynthate is carbon neutral. The Federales burn it in big piles for TV.Entertaining, but not climate changing.

If you can bury plants, or something similar that slows or stops decomposition then it becomes carbon negative. But, if you use a big diesel powered digger to bury them, you are back to fossil C use.

Whatever is locked away in evidence rooms is carbon sequenstration. Just like paper-filled libraries or your stash of decades of National Geographic magazines

Hey, has Nat Geo ever done a cannibis article? I seem to remember one on poppies. Could be hallucinating that though...

 

I do remember reading something on poppies in a magazine with very bright colorful photos. Could well have been a Nat Geo article on Afghanistan. Long time ago. Very very hazy now.

 

Soft drinks use non-fossil CO2 taken from the air, which makes them carbon-neutral except for the energy used to make them and the fuel used to deliver them. In the first respect they'd be carbon-neutral no matter whether the industry used a hundred tonnes of CO2 per year or a billion tonnes.

You really need to understand the concept of "greenhouse gas"; it was described by Arrhenius more than 100 years ago, so there's no excuse. You also need to understand the difference between fossil-derived CO2 and non-fossil CO2. Ignorance of those things leaves you with nothing to add to any discussion of global warming.

Google is your friend. For specific detailed discussions by experts see
http://www.realclimate.org

 

Because the CO2 produced by fermentation was the result of biological processes that pulled the CO2 out of the atmosphere in the first place. Burning coal or oil, OTOH, is taking CO2 that has been out of the atmosphere for millions/hundreds of millions of years.

Your point about the oceans doesn't really mean anything. the fact taht the CO2 we're pumping into the atmosphere could trigger said release is more important by far.

 

Actually a large (like the PETM) increase in ocean temperature would release quite a large fraction of the (1000 petagrams) dissolved inorganic carbon from shallow oceans. It is among the tipping points suggested to not exist by our Octane recently.

Yes, correct, the biological processes of photosynthesis and respiration move a lot of carbon in and out of the atmosphere each year. The gross fluxes sum to more than 120 petagrams per year. But here is where an understanding of the global carbon cycle can help all of us -- the ups and downs are extremely well balanced. Net CO2 increase in the atmosphere is now only half as fast as the release from fossil fuel combustion. Therefore, not only is the natural carbon system well balanced, it is currenty limiting the CO2 increase. Prett nifty.

Fossill C is diffferent because it contains less of the 13C isotope, but that is not the main point here. The point is the rate at which this additional carbon is introduced to the atmosphere. At the current rate (9 petagrams C per year) it is almost (but not quite) overwhelming the biological system's uptake capacity. As above, half is 'biologicalized' and half remains in the atmosphere as CO2.

All about the rate. Since the dawn of agriculture, large human population expansion, land-ue changes, and (attempted) release of biological CO2 to the atmosphere. This story of some 5000 (but especially the more recent 2000) years is now fascinatingly being uncovered and reconstructed by Kaplan in the journal "The Holocene" and Klein Goldewijk in "Global Ecology and Biogeogrphy". During the millenia, as much as 350 petagrams C was released from land-use change, which if correct exceeds the 275 (or so) total fossil C emission per date.

But when released over thousands of years, the biological system can handle it and atmospheric CO2 does not appreciably increase. See? Totally nifty. However, if you release 100s petagrams over the scale of decades. Biology is overwhelmed and CO2 goes up.

So please, when you here somebody say 'fossil fuel C is bad' please give them the benefit of the doubt and suppose that they refer to the relative rates of release. It may very well be that the undestand the system better than you do, and are are speaking with fewer words.

IMHO realclimate is not the best place to learn the basics of the global carbon cycle. Wiki page is better, get your mind loosened up there and then google to other introductory material.

I don't know which intro page does a partucularly good job on the 'rate of increase' thing. We may need to wait for the Kaplan and K-G stuff (above) to get into enough people's heads.

OK, class is over, back to tokin'.

 

I don't profess to be an expert - on either the THC or the CO2 - but my understanding of 'triggers' is that methane release from melting permafrost could be significantly worse than any chemical changes in the oceans. Is that accurate?

 

Excellent tochatihu,
but I would like to add a couple of rinkles.

A significant portion of this CO2 is sequestered by dissolving in the oceans. The higher the concentration of CO2 in the air the more that will go in the ocean, but the equilibrium shifts the hotter we get. The percentage the water takes decreases as the temperature increases.

Deforestation not only releases CO2 but inhibits the ability to handle the excess CO2. Factory farming of livestock emits a great deal more ghg than would naturally occur.

We are at about a concentration of 390ppm. Some of the tipping points are predicted to be as low as 450ppm. We have increased that concentration of 60 ppm just since the early 70s.

I don't think removing all the grow lights will slow down the rate of change appreciably. Similarly the cap and trade of co2 in europe has not changed these equations.

 

Chemically they're the same of course. Isotopically, the atmospheric/biospheric carbon has some proportion of C13, but that has no effect on it as a greenhouse gas. Your second point is key: the non-fossil carbon keeps cycling around and therefore is always close to equilibrium with the atmosphere. But *fossil* carbon has been locked away for more than 300 million years: when it is released it increases the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, because the mechanisms that lock it back up again underground operate very slowly. It's a rates problem: when the tap adds water to the bathtub faster than the drain can let it out, the water level in the tub rises.

Human activities every year now release about 30 billion tonnes of CO2 derived from fossil carbon. Simple measurement shows that atmospheric CO2 is increasing by roughly 10 billion tonnes per year. The simple conclusion is that our activities overwhelm the natural sequestration processes. If we didn't burn any fossil fuels, if we burnt only biofuels such as wood (or whatever) we would have no net effect on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, because we would be releasing only carbon that came out of the atmosphere a few years before and would have been returned to the atmosphere in a few years anyway as the wood (or whatever) rotted.