Greta Glares: Pot is Environmentally Unfriendly

Timothy Birdnow

What would Greta say?

Here is something quite interesting; it seems marijuana growers use vast amounts of electricity in the production of commercial cannabis.

From the Canada Free Press article:

Just how much electricity does the entire US marijuana industry consume?

The numbers are mind-boggling.

They’re also the bane of the cannabis industry, according to Joseph Maskell, founder and president of AAXLL, one cannabis company aiming to be a major disrupter of the short-lived status quo.

"The key in this emerging industry is to be asset-light,” says Maskell.

"With billions spent just on electricity in the US cannabis-growing industry, the companies that will survive the next culling, which is already in process, will be those with low capital outlays, no warehouses, no buildings, no machinery.”

Back in 2016, after the state of Oregon legalized recreational marijuana, Pacific Power in Portland recorded seven blackouts that the company traced to marijuana production.

Meanwhile, a good 45% of Denver’s increase in energy demand or "load growth” was directly linked to electricity that went to power marijuana growth.

The electricity consumption of marijuana grow houses is staggering when you compare it to consumption by the average business or residential unit.

In 2014, the NPCCworked out that it takes 4,000 to 6,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy to produce a single kilogram of marijuana product. Electricity costs can represent 20% of the total cost of cannabis production.

Back in 2015, it was estimated that a 5,000-square-foot indoor facility in Boulder County consumed ~41,808 kilowatt-hours per month—or nearly 66x the average consumption by a household in the county. More than two percent of the city’s electricity usage went to marijuana production.

More recent estimates are not very encouraging either, even as more energy professionals enter the marketplace.

Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says that production of legal marijuana in the US consumes 1% of total electricity, or 41.71 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, at a cost of $6 billion per year.

That’s enough energy to power 3.8 million homes or the entire State of Georgia. Generating that much electricity spews out 15m tons of greenhouse gas emissions (CO2), or about what three million average cars would produce in a year.

What will Greta say?  Somehow I suspect this story will fly under the radar in the pro-pot mainstream media, and the environmental activists won't worry about the greenhouse gases being emitted to grow their favorite adult plant.

Liberalism is all about balancing sometimes opposing crackpot ideas. You have feminism and transgenderism, two diametrically opposed kookeries.  Feminists are being forced to accept men in drag as their own, a galling thing.  You have opposing minorities, many of whom hate one another. For example, a great many political blacks hate Jews, and blacks and Hispanics both hate each-other. But as the goal is to stick it to the White Man they manage to maintain an uneasy peace, a peace that will shatter if and when they attain their goal.

So now we have Gang Greens and Potheads.

It should be fairly easy to split these groups. We just have to make it a priority. Sadly, too few Conservatives will understand the importance, preferring to talk about taxes or other things only interesting to other conservatives. And many just won't bother.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:22 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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