Thanks to “Climate Desk” for pointing out this gem of an article.
These factoids are from the earth-friendly “Mother Jones” magazine “24 Mind-Blowing Facts About Marijuana Production in America”, referencing several federal data sources.
A few of those points:
- 80 percent of all marijuana grown in the USA comes from California, Tennessee Kentucky, Hawaii, and Washington. The vast majority comes from California.
- In 2013, California authorities seized 329 outdoor pot grow sites with: 1.2 million plants, 119,000lbs of trash, 17,000lbs of fertilizer, 40gal. of pesticides, 244 propane tanks, 61 car batteries, 89 illegal dams, and 81 miles of irrigation pipe.
- During California’s growing season, outdoor grows consumed roughly 60 million gallons of water a day – 50% more than is used by all residents of San Francisco.
- In California, indoor pot growing accounts for about 9% of household electricity use.
- For every pound of pot grown indoors, 4600lbs of carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere. California’s production equates to emissions of 3 million cars.
- The energy needed to produce a single joint is enough to produce 18 pints of beer, and creates emissions comparable to burning a 100 watt light bulb for 25 hours.
Source: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/marijuana-pot-weed-statistics-climate-change
References: Jon Gettman (2006), US Forest Service (California outdoor grow stats include small portions of Oregon and Nevada), Office of National Drug Control Policy, SF Public Utilities Commission, Evan Mills (2012).
I’m sure eco-activists will jump right on this trash-making climate-killing water-sucking pot problem we have here in California and include it right up there with the urgency of the proposed statewide plastic bag ban and banning fracking by chartering buses:
Mitchell explained that as San Diegans living at the end of the water pipeline, it is even more critical that we participate in this rally to convince Governor Brown that water is a precious natural resource more necessary than fracked oil and gas. “This awful drought effects us all and we need to stop wasting that water on fracking,” she said.
Yeah, but dude, pot is a life necessity.
Big mistake. Do not try to reason with hippie-crits. Facts are meaningless to such individuals.
1kW grow light, that’s what is in the standard 4-plant grow module. Run time is 12 hours per day for 60 days during the 78 day cycle. Production per cycle is about 1.5 pounds dry weight.
Well, let’s see, 12×60 = 720 hours. 720×2/3 = 480 hours (for one pound). 480 x 1000 = 480 KW-hours. 4600 pounds of CO_2 is the equivalent of ~2150 KW/hours. This means that the actual cost in electricity is less than 1/4 of what is being asserted, assuming that one is growing pot in a “standard 4 plant module” instead of in a larger space at a larger scale, where one very likely can support more than 4 plants on 1 KW. I’m suggesting that the number is likely closer to 10. Water and etc are a highly variable energy cost — if you are growing pot in a very dry location and don’t conserve greenhouse moisture or have to run air conditioning to dump the heat from the light bulbs, sure, it might be significant. In general, however, I suspect that it is a small fraction of the cost of the electricity, basically a correction. If you use a lot of fertilizer, that might cost some more energy, but again, likely a correction, not an extra factor.
Perhaps what they mean is that “if the growers do things at the worst possible scale, paying the highest possible prices in the least efficient environment in terms of water cost and availability at the worst time of year, they can manage to generate 4600 pounds of CO_2 growing a pound of pot”. On average? I don’t think so. Your own argument should convince you that you shouldn’t think so either, since you just demonstrated that the argument is off by a factor of 4 if you grow only 4 plants at a time with a single light and hence waste a large solid angle of the produced light. And that is before one factors in the use of natural light, local stream or well or grey water, energy generated by means of natural gas (which produces a lot less CO_2), energy generated by nuclear plants or hydroelectric plants (which may not be common in CA, don’t know) or even solar power, however stupid it is to use a solar farm to make the electricity to run grow lights indoors. Also there is good reason to believe that professionals, seeking to minimize costs where it matters, have long since adopted LED growing lights:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/hubs-energy-efficiency1
that at least halve, if not quarter, production costs even from the levels you suggest above.
BTW, all of this is really very old news, and I didn’t buy it the first time. The assertions that growing pot is responsible for some horrendous fraction — 1% is an oft-cited number — of the net electricity consumption of the United States dates back at least to 2011, if not to 2006. I personally think it is part of the effort to legalize it — by suggesting that we can cut national energy consumption and production of CO_2 by 1% tomorrow if we legalized pot at the federal level and removed ALL government restrictions on it throughout the states, pot smokers and green warmists can leverage their mutual agendas.
That number — 1% — supposedly takes into account everything. Heating and cooling homes. Industry. Lighting city streets with lights that do nothing at all but stay on all night and consume kilowatts per city block, kilowatts per parking lot, kilowatts per store. For this estimate to be plausible, how many pounds of pot have to be grown per linear mile of lighted roadway? Seriously, I just don’t buy it.
rgb
Ack! TCH = TCH.
And I STILL can’t get it right… TCH =THC.
Well, this will put and end to all the nonsense coming from the University students. And the protests and petitions. Maybe even a few of the Professors will lighten up now, who knows.
@rgbatduke says:
March 17, 2014 at 4:41 pm
Oh brother… You did snip the part where I said this was JUST for the lights, I noticed. And you didn’t read the report, where the 0.6 kW lights go on for the other 18 days? And the numbers for pumps, dehumidifiers, drying, air conditioning, etc?
I see The Guardian article is light on numbers, long on claims. No doubt Dr. Mills could recalculate his work if more information on yield vs the spectrum shitf in LED’s was forthcoming. How about you do him and us a favor and read his work before offering off-the-cuff criticisms?
DirkH says: …Nobody ever smoked himself to a Nobel price…
oh, you have nooooo idea.
this kind of ignorance merits encouragement, though, so i won’t mention polymerase chain reaction or anything that might shatter your bliss.
A number of posters in this thread seem to have forgotten a basic tenet of CAGW, mainly that it is only the CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels that cause CAGW. All other CO2 emissions have either no effect or are beneficial.
So, smoke ’em if you got ’em.
🙂
Hothouse tomatoes can be purchased for $1.50 per pound here. They have roughly the same growing time as weed. In reality, this article is BS.
DJHawkins……”he says 200 watts per sq ft, maybe an extra 50 more”–my paraphrase…..
You are kidding me right? 4 by 4 table = 16 sq feet x 200 = 3200watts of lights!!! That is beyond ridiculous and patently absurd.
No person on this planet has ever used that much wattage per square foot. Period.
This is not an argument, I am telling you how it is.
March 17, 2014 at 12:07 pm | Gary says:
This is the PO-leez, open up !
In another thread, something involving terpenes of pine trees and climate change, I posted that cannabis plants have terpenes too. I also mentioned that some people clean the harvested leaves with dry ice, or carbon dioxide and some dry ice produce by burning fossil fuels. I had asked if this hurt or helped the earth. I was curious because we’re at the beginning stage of legalizing it state by state and it may increase production. I’m imagining it becoming a big agribusiness on the scale of tobacco.
What is this, knucklehead night? Next you’ll be telling me how if I sail past the horizon, I’ll fall off the edge of the world, and that’s “how it is”. Come back after you read the ‘effing paper. Then we can discuss the good doctor’s assumptions and calculations. And by the way, it’s not 200 watts/sqft of lighting. Which you would know if you’d actually read the 13 pages. It’s 200 watts/sqft of overall demand.
From Breathless in Chico…”A few of those points:
80 percent of all marijuana grown in the USA comes from California.”
From the original article…”80 percent comes from California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii, and Washington.”
What THE F is up with that? Is this the level that you stoop too? Just make up your own bs?
I’m qualified in horticulture, I can tell you for a fact California has a fantastic climate for growing exotic plants, if you want to boost the crop of any commercial plant, increase the conditions favorable for it to grow, in Ireland you wouldn’t grow potatoes or beets in a greenhouse unless you were producing a very expensive product.
I read the paper DJ Hawkins. The person who wrote the paper is making assumptions that simply do not pan out in the real world. A little like people who make models that do not relate to reality.
Have you ever grown indoors? Has the good Dr who wrote this paper ever grown indoors?
13,000kwh for a 16 square foot area per year is BS.
Again, this is not an argument. You are being told what is real from experience and the hard knocks of learning by doing. Alas, keep reading your junk papers.
By the way, my comment above outlining the cost to refrigerator ratio can not be challenged because those numbers are real and not some pie in the sky crap.
Hippi-crits Indeed, alexwade! Beautiful!
Here in the socialist ecotopia of Washington state and across the US, we have railed and ranted for decades against the evils of ‘Big Tobacco’. Smoking is bad. Second hand smoke is bad. The Sturgeon General warned us on TV, billboards, etc.: “Smoking Is Bad!” This new age socially unacceptable behavior had to be stopped, for the good of everyone. So we made smoking illegal in most public places and taxed the living hippi-crit right out of it! Today, the Washington state tax on a pack of 20 cigarettes is $3.025 …. but the state is unhappy because their tax revenue source is disappearing as most people have stopped smoking.
Hmmmmmmm – How can a state full of hippi-crits recover from declining cigarette tax revenues?
“Hey! How about creating a whole new tobacco growing, distributing, and smoking industry??!!! YEAH – Marijuana! That’s The TICKET!”
(“But, er… the Sturgeon General told us smoking was bad… and we should never start or, if we did smoke, stop right away, ’cause it can cause cancer… and emphysema… and stuff??”)
“Pay no attention to that guy behind the keyboard folks! This isn’t a case of ‘The Pot Calling The Kettle Black’…. it’s a case of The State Treasury is in the Red! We gotta get us some tax money!”
Soooooo… We created a Washington state commercial marijuana growing, distributing, retail sales and smoking (Oh Baby!) industry! We expanded the state bureaucracies (Oh! Oh Baby!) to license and tax (Oh Baby! OH BABY!!) every stage of it too! It’s “Green” (like money!) from one side to the other! But wait – There’s more! If Washington can push through a ‘CO2 source’ tax, they’ll be able to tax folks both inhaling and exhaling!
Think you might want to grow your own ‘little garden in the backyard by the fence’, strictly for personal consumption? THAT won’t generate any license or tax revenues, you damn tax evaders, so THAT is gonna stay illegal! If the state can’t tax it, Axe It!
That’s how we Roll y’all, here in the hippi-crit socialist ecotopia of Washington State!
Now, should we have a little Doobie Brothers, to go with that ‘torpedo’? No – I think this will be more poignant… enjoy! He’s An Old Hippie – The Bellamy Brothers
http://youtu.be/zCa4Hj_czYA
4 x 4 area = 1 600 w light (do the numbers with a 1000w light if you want), 1 h2o pump, 1 6th of 1 exhaust fan, 1 6th of 1 1200 w indoor A/C unit, 1 6th of 1 (propane powered) CO2 gen, 1 oscillating fan.
Light is on for 12 hours.
Pump is on for 15 minutes.
Exhaust fan is on for 8 hours (max).
CO2 is propane.
Oscillating Fan is on for 8 hours.
You do the math. Or do you really need a Ph.D to add it up for yourself?
You and your guys numbers do not add up. PERIOD.
[CO2 is propane? I don’t think so. Also note that the article numbers are by Mother Jones, quoted here -mod]
Oh yeah, Ac on for 10 hours
D.J. Hawkins March 17, 2014 at 6:15 pm
Tobacco, tea and coco is expensive because it is grown in greenhouses! wrong.
Your PhD would have me spending $780 per month on a six light array. Much like one that I actually had when I lived in Colorado. That $780 would be 13,000kwh x 6 x .12(cost per kwh) / 12 = $780.
My electric bill never went over $450. PERIOD. And that was with me living in the house using power for all of my own needs.
The paper makes assumptions that are not real. And here you go, sucking it up like all of those models that tell you the global temp is rising and we are all doomed. DOOMED.
gaelansclark says:
March 17, 2014 at 6:33 pm
600w metal halide during 18 days of leaf for 18 hours per day, 1000w high pressure sodium for 60 days for 12 hours per day. Fan on during lights on, so 12 or 18 hours per day, not 8. If you have a 1000w heating load (lamp), how do you remove this with 1/6th of a 1200w A/C unit? Where are you getting all the other 1/6th multipliers in fact? Pump on for 1 hour per day, not 15 minutes. And on and on. All numbers on his side are from manufacturer’s cut sheets, trade media, open literature, or the supply houses. If you grow your weed they way you say, I guess you’re just not that good at it.
Mother Jones is straight party politics. Numbers are pulled out of thin air to match the policy they want to establish.
The next “truth” they print would be the first.
@ur momisugly Michael says:
March 17, 2014 at 12:53 pm
If you drive up and around Northern California and wounder why people are driving brand new 4X4 trucks with all the bells and whistles ($$$$$) and have ‘Earth First’ or ‘GreenPeace’ and ‘Love Animals don’t eat them’ bumper stickers it’s not because they are growing grapes. I will give you 100 guesses BUT the first 99 don’t count.
_____________________________________________________________
‘Love Animals…’ Ok, I KNEW there was something wrong with those Treehuggers! Are they “hugging” little bunnies and lambs now too??!
Weirdos!
Seriously, I agree with them, sort of—I love animals, too: they taste great with the right barbeque sauce…
But my all-time favorite bumper sticker:
“Earth First! (We’ll strip mine the other planets later…)”
But ja, I have to agree, I have a problem with the production of one pound of grass producing over 4600 lbs of CO2. I’m no farmer, but I do garden. That just doesn’t pass the sniff test. And they don’t mention methane at all (think fertilizers), etc., at all. Sounds like more of that “Every Google search burns enough joules to boil a pot of coffee” sort of thing.
For example, the study says, “Based on the model developed in this article, approximately
13,000 kW/h/year of electricity is required to operate a standard production module (a 1.2×1.2×2.4 m (4x4x8 ft) chamber). Each module yields approximately 0.5 kg (1 pound) of final product per cycle, with four or five production cycles conducted per year. A single grow house can contain 10 to 100 such modules.”
100 4x4x8 foot modules. Seriously? THAT’s a BIIIIIG house. Sorry; no sale. I haven’t had time to more than skim the thing; but the paragraphs leading up to the “3 million cars” quote—yes, that’s actually in the Evans 2012 report—seem to make a lot of assumptions; like that everyone who grows the stuff is high-tech to the max. I think a residence that drew as much power as a small office complex would be VERY easy for DEA to suss out.
It all sounds very logical, the way he puts it, but still—over two-and-a-quarter tons of CO2 for every pound of marijuana? How is it that a rainforest then is such a large CO2 sink?
I need to get smarter on this, but does this make sense to anyone else? It appears as if they just ran numbers for the power required by their assumptions, did a little math on what a coal-fired powerplant would produce as a byproduct in CO2, and bam! there ya have it. As Perry Mason might’ve said, they’re arguing facts not in evidence. Or so it appears to me.