Marijuana isn't 'green?'

One joint is equal to two pounds of carbon emissions, according to a new study that finds growing weed is not-so eco-friendly.

(Image credit: Corbis)

last updated 8 January 2015

The jokes practically write themselves: A new study by a U.S. government energy analyst (working on his own time) found that marijuana cultivation is a huge power suck, and a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. How not-green is weed? The study's author, Evan Mills of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, estimates that before anyone even smokes it, pot growing uses 1 percent of U.S. electricity and creates 17 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. That means each joint equals two pounds of carbon emissions. What does this mean for the green movement?

Hippies ruin everything: Mills may have "a puritanical streak," but it's hard to deny his conclusion, says Andrew Orlowski in The Register. "Stoners are helping destroy the planet." Clearly, there's a reason household energy use jumped 50 percent in California's Humboldt County after medical pot was legalized in 1996: Grow lights, climate control, and other special indoor-growing equipment uses a lot of juice.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

This study is complete hokum: This "latest anti-cannabis propaganda" is pure "nonsense," says Nick Rosen at Off-Grid. Mills seems to rely on "ill-informed speculation" in coming up with his highly speculative figures, ignoring that while pot growing does use electricity, it doesn't necessarily use fossil fuels. In fact, California's pot growers were "the first major market for solar power," in the 1980s, and still "rely heavily on solar and wind power."

People are missing the point — pot growers need to go green: The best part of this story has been "being able to rib those self-righteous, eco-conscious medicinal users who think just because it's green, well, it's green," says Dennis Romero in LA Weekly. But Mills isn't going after "the hippie cannabis club." He favors "further decriminalization," in fact, since the best way to have green pot is growing it outdoors, or at least coaxing outlaw pot growers from dirty diesel generators onto California's greener power grid.