Insatiable demand for cannabis has created a giant carbon footprint

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
All energy production has drawbacks. My opinion is that hydroelectric is the least shitty in a pool of nothing but shitty choices.
hydro totally fucks up entire ecosystems. Hydro Dams are being shut down wherever they can find better options.

Solar is the best answer for how to generate the majority of power. But there isn't going to be just one source. Wind, wave, tidal and geothermal can all play a role. Using all of them and improvements in efficiency and conservation, it's possible to be carbon neutral without nuclear, though nuclear might be necessary in some places where sustainable energy isn't workable.
 

schuylaar

Well-Known Member
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The life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from indoor cannabis cultivation modeled across the U.S. Credit: Haile

It's no secret that the United States' $13 billion cannabis industry is big business. Less obvious to many is the environmental toll this booming business is taking, in the form of greenhouse gas emissions from commercial, mostly indoor production.

A new study by Colorado State University researchers provides the most detailed accounting to date of the industry's carbon footprint, a sum around which there is only limited understanding. What is clear, though, is that consumer demand for cannabis is insatiable and shows no signs of stopping as more states sign on to legalization.

The study, published in Nature Sustainability, was led by graduate student Hailey Summers, whose advisor, Jason Quinn, is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Summers, Quinn and Evan Sproul, a research scientist in mechanical engineering, performed a life-cycle assessment of indoor cannabis operations across the U.S., analyzing the energy and materials required to grow the product, and tallying corresponding greenhouse gas emissions.

They found that greenhouse gas emissions from cannabis production are largely attributed to electricity production and natural gas consumption from indoor environmental controls, high-intensity grow lights, and supplies of carbon dioxide for accelerated plant growth.

"We knew the emissions were going to be large, but because they hadn't been fully quantified previously, we identified this as a big research opportunity space," Summers said. "We just wanted to run with it."

The CSU group's efforts update previous work by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers, which quantified small-scale grow operations in California and predated the cascade of state-by-state legalization since Colorado was first to legalize in 2012. To date, 36 states have legalized medical use of cannabis, and 15 have legalized recreational use.

Mapping variable emissions

The CSU team surmised there would be substantial variability in emissions depending on where the product was being grown, due to climate as well as electric grid emissions. Their recently published work captures the potential cross-country spread of large commercial warehouses for growing cannabis, and it models emissions for several high-growth locations around the country. Their results include a map that shows relative emissions anywhere in the U.S., as defined as emissions per kilogram of cannabis flower. They've also developed a GIS map that allows users to enter a county name and find local emissions estimates.


Their research shows that U.S. indoor cannabis cultivation results in life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of between 2,283 and 5,184 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of dried flower. Compare that to emissions from electricity use in outdoor and greenhouse cannabis growth, which is 22.7 and 326.6 kilograms of carbon dioxide, respectively, according to the New Frontier Data 2018 Cannabis Energy Report. Those outdoor and greenhouse numbers only consider electricity, while the CSU researchers' estimate is more comprehensive, but the comparison still highlights the enormously larger footprint of indoor grow operations.

The researchers were surprised to find that heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems held the largest energy demand, with numbers fluctuating depending on the local climate—whether in Florida, which requires excessive dehumidifying, or Colorado, where heating is more important.

The high energy consumption of cannabis is due in part to how the product is regulated, Quinn said. In Colorado, many grow operations are required to be in close proximity to retail storefronts, and this has caused an explosion of energy-hungry indoor warehouses in urban areas like Denver. According to a report from the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment, electricity use from cannabis cultivation and other products grew from 1% to 4% of Denver's total electricity consumption between 2013 and 2018.

The team is seeking more funding for continuing their modeling work, with hopes of extending it to a comparison between indoor and potential outdoor growth operations. Ultimately, they would like to help the industry tackle environmental concerns while legal cannabis is still relatively new in the U.S.

"We would like to try and improve environmental impacts before they have become built into the way of doing business," Sproul said.
oh yah sure it's the Americans.:lol:

pretty amazing Cali doesn't grow..how do they do it?
 
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schuylaar

Well-Known Member
Our farm is off grid in NorCal. We have 2 greenhouses and a solar well for water. The wholesalers that buy our greenhouse crops tell us its as good as indoor. 0 watts used.....nothing beats the Sun
View attachment 4905586View attachment 4905587
that's right you pollinate and fly, fly, fly..but don't get too high. i don't think he can THC doesn't do any unless you carbolate +it's a wasp, i hate those fuckers.

Beauty! nice pic JJ:clap:
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
that's right you pollinate and fly, fly, fly..but don't get too high. i don't think he can THC doesn't do any unless you carbolate +it's a wasp, i hate those fuckers.

Beauty! nice pic JJ:clap:
That's a honeybee gathering pollen. European strain. It is a beautiful pic @doublejj.

I've chewed on fresh flower just to see what it tasted like. It gave me a mild buzz. Maybe not not from THCa, which you do need to decarboxylate. So I hear. Maybe it was the terpenes?
 

schuylaar

Well-Known Member
with the sun......this post is about the carbon footprint from energy production used for indoor cannabis growing under lights. In Cali we use the sun.
what midwestern state(s) are energy hogs and how do we know it's from cannabis production.
 

printer

Well-Known Member
Had plants outside last summer, because of the shorter season I picked up the plants and brought them in and out each day to give them 12 hours of darkness. Only to find SEEDS! A SHIT TON OF SEEDS! So the seeds (shitty dope, daddy was no winner) are given a second chance. Daddy was an auto and wherever the pollen came from, hopefully I will have the plants far enough along if the pollen drifts my way again. Not a serious grow, just want to find out what the seeds will produce if given a chance.
 

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
Had plants outside last summer, because of the shorter season I picked up the plants and brought them in and out each day to give them 12 hours of darkness. Only to find SEEDS! A SHIT TON OF SEEDS! So the seeds (shitty dope, daddy was no winner) are given a second chance. Daddy was an auto and wherever the pollen came from, hopefully I will have the plants far enough along if the pollen drifts my way again. Not a serious grow, just want to find out what the seeds will produce if given a chance.
You live in Manitoba and they farm hemp there by the square mile, cannabis is wind pollenated...
 

Bagginski

Well-Known Member
They're not storing the waste in your closet :wall: You sound like you're giving a book report on a book you didn't read :lol:
Nuclear energy is very energy dense. "The generation of electricity from a typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear power station, which would supply the needs of more than a million people, produces only three cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste per year". So to fully power America with only nuclear energy, we would need 330 plants. That would be 990 cubic meters of high level nuclear waste per year. The average walmart is 180,000 sq ft. If the ceiling was 20' tall (I have no idea of the actual ceiling height), that would make your average walmart 101,813 cubic meters. Divide that by the 990 cu meters of waste per year, and there is enough space in 1 single walmart, to hold the "high level" nuclear waste (which has 98% of the radiation) from 102 years of energy production for the entire country. If my math is correct, I'm pretty stoned :bigjoint:
As for the nuclear waste we have now from energy production, we're the only country that doesn't recycle the nuclear waste. I would imagine a good amount of the waste could be refined, and used again, if we were to adopt the processes that other countries already utilize.
Radiation is such a buzz word, probably from the cold war days. Everyone is worried about being melted. Radiation is everywhere. Google says "
On average, Americans receive a radiation dose of about 0.62 rem (620 millirem) each year. Half of this dose comes from natural background radiation. Most of this background exposure comes from radon in the air, with smaller amounts from cosmic rays and the Earth itself."
No one is going to experience radiation period, much less poisoning from waste stored hundreds of feet in the earth, below the biosphere. Not only will you not experience any radiation, you'll never knows it's there.
"Geological repositories for HLW are designed to ensure that harmful radiation would not reach the surface even in the event of severe earthquakes or through the passage of time. The designs for long-term disposal incorporate multiple layers of protection. Waste is encapsulated in highly engineered casks in stable, vitrified form, and is emplaced at depths well below the biosphere. Such long-term geological storage solutions are designed to prevent any movement of radioactivity for thousands of years.
Whilst the timeframes in question preclude full testing, nature has provided analogous examples of the successful storage of radioactive waste in stable geological formations. About two billion years ago, in what is now Gabon in Africa, a rich natural uranium deposit produced spontaneous, large nuclear reactions which ran for many years. Since then, despite thousands of centuries of tropical rain and subsurface water, the long-lived radioactive 'waste' from those 'reactors' has migrated less than 10 metres."
Doesn't get much more conclusive than that, hard to argue with billions of years worth of evidence.
I suggest an in-depth dive into the state of things at Fukushima: the three missing reactor cores, for example - which ate through the containment vessels and disappeared through the floor, and the fact that they haven’t been able to do ANYTHING to clean up, or even scope things out, as the *radiation* fries the robots they send in. Spent fuel rod pools can’t be emptied or repaired because the *radiation* prevents people from getting close enough to do anything useful. The area’s ground water is contaminated, and they can’t treat it, so they bag it up, store it for a while, then dump it into the ocean. Your fairy tale is a deadly dangerous one.
 

doublejj

Well-Known Member
Inside America's most toxic nuclear waste dump, where 56 million gallons of buried radioactive sludge are leaking into the earth

As The Daily Beast reported, "Hanford is the worst kind of mess: the kind that humanity is capable of making, but not capable of cleaning up."
 
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