Washington Post Is Very Concerned To Know If Growing Marijuana Can Go Green

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.

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