Buzzkill of the Day: U.S. Marijuana Industry Responsible for $5 Billion in Energy Consumption

It might be all - lifelike , but that stick you ’re smoking has a serious carbon paper footprint : marijuana ontogenesis apply 1 % of all U.S. energy .

Buzzkill , stoner brother . Your weed is really uncollectible for the environment . Only the material that ’s grown inside , to be fair — the kind of dress shop - y , mind - blow pot preferred by manymarijuana dispensaries . It ’s responsible for 1 % of all electrical energy use in the U.S. That ’s a $ 5 billion annual energy bill — two million U.S. dwelling house ’ worth — just to get you exceedingly stoned .

The sobering intelligence hail from a write up byEvan Mills , a longtime energy psychoanalyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs who , uh , has a champion who told him about all this weed stuff . According to Mills , the problem can be traced back to the gamy - intensity lighting , dehumidification , air - conditioning , irrigation system , blank space - heating , and ventilation system that all go into making certain marijuana plants grow up to be healthy , smokeable adult . And since the industry run in the trace , it has n’t matte up the consumer pressure to go unripened ( rimshot ! ) .

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factory ’s report gets even more intense when the energy consumption figures are broken down into consumer - favorable numbers . Smoking a single spliff is the same as leaving a 100 - watt light bulb on for 17 hours . For you more committed drug peddlers out there , each kilo is the same as five cross - country drives in a 44 - mpg car .

So , smoke a spliff of indoor - grow gage is like leaving the lights on for a day , and sitting around for 60 minutes with a fistful of friends and a bong is as bad carbon emissions - wise as taking a really long road tripper . Evan Mills has yet to calculate the added environmental costs of your vaporiser .

The simple resolution to this is to nix indoor rise trading operations ; the energy consumption of outdoor operations is near nil . But the medical marijuana food market isset to growto $ 8.9 billion in the next five years , so cutting back is probably out of the question . Instead , marijuana production needs to be legalized , so people will actually cast a critical centre on its vim utilization . All the industry has to do is follow in the stride of the commercial agrarian industry , which has madestridesin muscularity efficiency in recent days . Then , at least , stoner will have one less matter to be paranoid about . In the meantime , possibly those dispensaries should get sell carbon offset with your one-eighth .

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