Colorado Weed Isn’t So Green After All

Colorado’s indoor marijuana farms produce substantially more greenhouse gasses than Colorado’s coal mining industry, according to a recent study from Colorado State University and published at nature.com.

According to the study’s lead author Haley Summers, growing an ounce of marijuana in Colorado creates the same emissions as burning between 7 and 16 gallons of gasoline. The revelation puts Democrats in yet another hypocritical bind as they are staunch advocates for legal weed at the same time that they constantly trash the fossil fuel industry for not being environmentally friendly.

Indoor marijuana growth requires grow lights, constant air circulation, dehumidification, and climate control systems that require a ton of energy – energy that must be provided by fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. Colorado is the 10th largest coal-producing state, and carbon emissions from Colorado weed production are 30% higher than those from coal mining.

The debate over the carbon emissions of coal versus weed may be without need, as atmospheric carbon dioxide’s causal relationship with global climate is far from established and morons like Al Gore have had their doomsdays come and go. This should be good news for liberal marijuana lovers, who can smoke in peace knowing that the energy required for weed production does not hurt the environment at all, but instead, they will be forced to confront their complicity in destroying the earth (if they’re not too high to think about it).

The propensity to rely on climate models instead of actual historical data (that ends up disproving the models) for climate policy betrays the real agenda behind radical environmentalism – big government control. It is no different fundamentally than the slavish adherence to coronavirus models that persists long after real-world data has shown them to be nonsense.

It remains to be seen how these Democrats will keep their supply of recreational marijuana online if they are able to start taxing carbon emissions – a move that will drive the price of marijuana production through the roof. Of course, it would be perfectly reasonable to assume Democrats would be willing to create a special carveout in environmental legislation to allow weed producers to avoid the scrutiny placed on the fossil fuel industry.