All You Would Be Growers? It Ain't Free As It Seems (Calgary Herald)

 

On Wednesday, November 25, 2010, at about 9:40 p.m., Airdrie RCMP executed a search warrant in the Morningside neighbourhood of Airdrie, Alberta. Two people were arrested on the scene and 661 marijuana plants, worth approximately $826,250.00, were seized.

Photograph by: Courtesy, Airdrie RCMP

Put this in your pipe and smoke it -American pot production is producing the carbon equivalent of nearly half of Alberta's oilsands.

According to Evan Mills, a PhD researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, indoor marijuana production in the U.S. emits 17 mega tonnes of C02. That is 42.5 per cent of the current CO2 emissions of Alberta's oilsands.

"The emergent industry of indoor cannabis production results in prodigious energy use, costs and greenhouse gas pollution," his report states.

Mills calculated that a 1.2-square-metre grow op space uses double the electricity of an average home. The lighting is as intense as that found in an operating room (which is 500 times more than needed for reading), six times the air-change rate of a biotech laboratory and about the electric power intensity of a data centre.

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