Greens - Pot Industry Creates Global Warming

Global Warming Will Kill Us All

• The war on drug took a different turn with Environmentalists saying pot growing helps cause "climate change,"

(Washington Times)  -  The nation’s booming marijuana sector is struggling to go green.

Analysts and state regulators say the cannabis industry — including states that have legalized recreational pot and those that offer it only for medicinal purposes — is outpacing many other areas of the economy in energy use, racking up massive electricity bills as more and more Americans light up.

“The basic issue is the lighting intensity inside these grow facilities is much, much higher than anything else. They like these facilities brighter than an operating room,” said Ron Flax, the chief building official in Boulder County, Colorado, who spearheads one of the nation’s leading programs designed to incentivize weed producers to cut their power use.

The county’s Marijuana Energy Impact Offset Fund, which tacks on a 2.16-cent surcharge for each kilowatt-hour of electricity used by grow facilities, is something of a model for other states, cities and counties that also recognize the growing energy drain that has resulted from the rapid expansion of legal cannabis.

Everything Causes Global Warming

Data show the issue, often lost beneath the societal and medical arguments around pot, deserves attention.

Recent estimates show that indoor cannabis cultivation racks up as much as $6 billion each year in energy costs. Pot produced indoors can use as much as 5,000 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce 1 kilogram of product output, according to research compiled by RenewableEnergyWorld.com.

The $6 billion-per-year figure is equivalent to about 1.7 million American homes and is about 1 percent of total national electricity consumption. The annual greenhouse gas pollution from the indoor cannabis industry is equivalent to that of about 3 million cars, said Evan Mills, an energy analyst and research affiliate at the University of California at Berkeley.

Indoor cultivation is estimated to spew as much as 15 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year — though some industry analysts say that data point and others are incomplete and premature, and that it’s too early to truly capture the carbon footprint of the fledgling sector.

In California, for example, which produces more pot than any other state in the nation, Mr. Mills said indoor pot growing accounts for about 3 percent of all electricity use in the state.

Figures in other states are similar — and those numbers almost surely will go even higher if the Justice Department doesn’t shut down the sector.

Seven states and the District of Columbia now allow recreational marijuana use, and four — California, Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada — passed ballot measures in November allowing non-medical consumption. With those legalizations will come massive production explosions.

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