Sorry to Harsh Your Vibe Stoners, But that Joint Is Killing Planet Earth

Sorry bro, those mellow vibes aren't healing the Ozone.

Freakonomics - While it might be all natural, it turns out that toking the green isn’t all that green. Especially if it’s grown indoors. A new study by Evan Mills, an energy analyst at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, examines the carbon footprint of the indoor marijuana industry. The results might kill your buzz if you’re an environmentalist...The analysis performed in this study finds that indoor Cannabis production results in energy expenditures of $5 billion each year, with electricity use equivalent to that of 2 million average U.S. homes. This corresponds to 1% of national electricity consumption or 2% of that in households. The yearly greenhouse-gas pollution (carbon dioxide, CO2 ) from the electricity plus associated transportation fuels equals that of 3 million cars. Energy costs constitute a quarter of wholesale value....Some of the biggest growing facilities have a carbon footprint on par with many industrial medical and technology operations. According to Mills, a typical indoor marijuana growing facility has “lighting as intense as that found in an operating room (500-times more than needed for reading), 6-times the air-change rate of a bio-tech laboratory and 60-times that of a home, and the electric power intensity of a data center.”

Harsh news for some mellow stoners. If you're an environmentalist and a stoner you may need to take a long, hard look at that doobie next time before you light the spliff.  Apparently all your peaceful vibes and good karma are straight up murdering this planet.

Unless people can just start growing bushels of this shit on their front lawns it's going to be mighty hard for your average "green" hippy to defend his next high with the usual arguments of:

"The government should just tax it maannn"...Sure but the government is also undergoing a gigantic green movement (whether it's true intentions are a cleaner earth or increased revenues is up for debate, but the fact remains that industries are being forced green).  I'm not sure you're going to be able to justify an indoor pot field that requires more energy than your average cancer treatment ward.

"Hemp can be used for just about anything, maaannnn, shirts, hats, satchels, even paper."  I never loved this one anyway, sorry I don't feel like wearing scratchy, cheap fabric in any form.  And I'm certainly not going to buy a legal pad of paper made of hemp.  Man kind perfected paper generations ago, we're not going back to using papyrus any time soon.  But aside from the point, it'll be hard to justify a cheap, ratty, stoner made hemp shirt that does more damage to the environment than Exxon Corp over a simple cotton grown t-shirt, especially since that whole slavery thing went away. Cotton's just the easy choice there.