An Inconvenient Weed

Green Police Moonbats 45 Comments

Examiner;

If the latest news out of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in San Francisco is accurate, those who both worry about the dangers of manmade climate change and support the legalization of marijuana are going to have to make a tough choice.
According to a report by Evan Mills, an energy analyst at the lab, the growing of marijuana indoors uses 1 percent of the U.S. electricity supply and creates 17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. That’s not including the carbon dioxide produced by exhaling pot smoke.

Update: Attempts to reach Green Party leader Elizabeth May for comment on a potential party rift were unsuccessful, as Ms. May is in Labrador convincing her members to vote for a Liberal.
h/t Syncrodox

45 Replies to “An Inconvenient Weed”

  1. I do like my weed but I don’t worry about AGW.
    Unfortunately I don’t know many other pot-smoking conservatives.

  2. But like all the other religions, environmental religion will simply find a way to close it’s collective eyes to any and all inconveniences.

  3. I am a conservative. Like Clinton I have tried pot. I inhaled but in deference to Global Warming, I never exhaled..I promise.

  4. Obviously, most of that electric consumption wouldn’t be necessary if pot were legal.
    .

  6. Of course the rational solution would be to legalize this common weed so users can grow it for their own use in their back yard. I’m glad the AGW zealotry has never looked at the beer industry and the CO2 that emits in production and consumption.
    Unfortunately the fact we must debate these obvious facts and fear governmental intervention for enjoying either of them shows we do not live in a world governed by reason.

  7. Mmmmmm. Weed, beer, wine, fossil fuels, breath.
    Seems that all the good things in life produce that essential carbon dioxide gas. Essential, invisible, odorless and harmless CO2 !!
    The world is a great place, now go and enjoy yourselves. Ignore the fearmongers – especially the media.

  8. I’m glad the AGW zealotry has never looked at the beer industry and the CO2 that emits in production and consumption.
    J*sus H Ch*ist,Occam. Don’t give the eco-cultists any ideas!!

  9. Mustn’t overreach. MJ cultivation is using this much electricity without legalization. With legalization, cultivation would likely use less electricity.

  10. I find it extremely dubious that all of the indoor pot growers use one percent of the total electrical energy produced in this country.
    One percent of that is a HUGE amount, more than enough to run a medium sized city for a year.
    Me thinks someone is twisting the data to further their agenda.

  11. Yeah well, I did my part. Two nights running I had flood lights blazing for the prescribed hour….just in case and to ensure I got my point across.
    Yeah I’m dubious also about the 1% figure…..I call Bravo Sierra.

  13. Lizzie May’s candidate in the last election managed to obtain 136 votes.
    The woman’s sacrifice should be duly noted and ignored.

  14. Putting the speciousness of the whole AGW/Co2 argument aside…legalization of mj does not equal lower electricity usage. The potency of grow-op pot is a result of technology. Growing under artificial, controlled conditions produces a superior product. Citing electricity usage in pot production as an AGW threat is self-defeating…the stupid hippies are actually for crappier pot…

  15. Why would Liz May support a Liberal when their record on GHG emissions was so awful?
    When Liberals came to power in 1993 GHG emissions were 601 MTs; by the time they left office emissions rose to 740 MTs – a 23% increase.
    GHG emissions dropped from 740 MTs in the last year of Liberal government to 692 MTs in 2010.
    Between 2005 and 2010, the economy grew by 6.3% whereas Canadian greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 6.5% (and the Canadian population rose by 6%).
    Harper’s record on GHG emissions is outstanding; May should be leading efforts to keep Liberals from power, not to gain power.
    Source: Environment Canada https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/default.asp?lang=en&n=BFB1B398-1

  16. Hmpffff. I do not expect stupid people to stop voting for loons or smoking pot any more than I would expect to see them give up sanctimony or hypocrasy.

  17. …the stupid hippies are actually for crappier pot…
    Heh, what would you expect from the drug addled? They take drugs because they can’t handle the realities of life.

  18. Meh, just like the eco-left ignores the real environmental impact of artificial contraceptives on Mother Gaia (along with the impact of celebrity planes and mansions that house few people), they’ll ignore the environmental impact of pot growing because they like it.
    Meanwhile, some elderly lady in the suburbs will have smart meter installed. When it’s 100º in summer, the energy company will shut off her power for a few hours to balance it out.
    Forward!

  21. To expand on the syncrodox post above, commercially-legal marijuana would be grown by companies and probably under artificial lighting: legalising it would not mean it would all be grown in window boxes and back yards.
    OTOH, if legalised in the US perhaps we could start importing Canadian ropes/lines/etc for sailing enthusiasts. Or those other uses for “good, hempen, rope.”

  25. “………May should be leading efforts to keep Liberals from power, not to gain power.”
    Yeah well, Lizzie and the groanie greens, place more importance on statism than the environment….CAGW is just an excuse for global Government…with tham as rulers of course….

  27. So what? From what I’ve heard from my patients who are engaged in the interior cultivation of cannabis, one can’t get the same quality of product by growing the weed outdoors. That, of course, assumes that one uses a one-step process where the high THC portions of the plants are ready for sale once the plant is mature. The production of 30% THC containing cannabis buds through the use of amateur genetic engineering and hydopoponic techniques is an impressive achievement.
    Back in the pre-electricity days, many cultures around the world were quite adept in making higher THC products with a multi-step process from outdoor grown cannabis. Hashish is one such concentration step and, given the prevalence of BC skunk weed, I run into more and more people who have never heard of hashish. Similarly, a simple extraction process using either ethanol or methylene chloride can remove the THC from currently discarded cannabis leaves to make a high THC oil. Again, the number of young cannabis users who have never heard of hash oil is astounding.
    Of course, the production of hashish is a labor intensive process and, for the spoiled urban moonbats who have never had to engage in any hard physical work, something which they’ll never do. Despite ideal opium poppy growing conditions in the BC interior (and they grow as a weed in my garden), there is no indigenous Canadian production of opium. Producing opium is one of the most labor intensive things one can imagine which explains why this only seems to happen in third world countries; OTOH, the labor intensive production of hashish and opium could be viewed as “green jobs”.

  28. Naturally grow pot is referred to as dirt weed…for a number of reasons…and hippies are too lazy to make hash. #labourintensivesucks

  30. A nation is logically only able to declare war on another nation, not on an idea.
    Nation versus nation: that’s fair. Nation versus idea: that’s absurd. It’s like asking: “how heavy is a second”?
    In war there is a victor and the defeated, the war ends, and to the victor go the spoils. When a nation wars with an idea, the war never ends. The War on Poverty is forty-eight years old! How’s that workin’ out fer ya? The War on Drugs – under many names – has been going on for a hundred years in one form or another, and by that name in particular for four decades. At what point does an idea win or concede defeat?
    Who benefits?

  32. stradivarius, what is reality? People create their own reality and the only debate I can see is whether or not there is an objective reality (which I believe) or whether reality is a social construct (the post-modernism BS).
    My reality is completely different from the reality of someone who works in the oilpatch. The reality of a city dweller is completely different from a farmer. We all inhabit our little reality tunnels which give us a narrow view of objective reality. Most of our brains function is reductive in nature to filter out 99.999% of reality and pass on the relevant bits to ones task at hand. That’s why it’s not possible to do neurosurgery on LSD; an example of the brains reality filters being let down and being flooded with pure reality and the lower level brain centers partial parsing of objective reality. Psychedelic drugs put one in greater contact with the underlying reality.
    A widespread misunderstanding of pharmacology is responsible for the common delusion that any psychoactive drugs let one “escape” from reality. True for sedative hypnotics and high dose opiates; many of the junkies I’ve seen appear to only be happy when they’re comatose. Similarly, severe alcoholics attempt to attain an alcohol induced stupor. Don’t see much barbiturate use these days but that was another reality blotting out drug.
    Stimulant drugs put people in closer contact with reality, although this may be enhancement of a personal reality tunnels function such as the preoccupation of tweekers with disassembling and reassembling common objects. That is one of the pathophysiologic effects of excess stimulant drug use whereas most people function significantly better than in the undrugged state.
    Cannabis is in the unique position of allowing its users to escape reality – in very high doses where it does cause coma sufficient for performing surgery on the heavily intoxicated person. Only in Vancouver did I see people smoking such massive amounts of weed. It can also be used to enhance reality; someone with arthritic pain who smokes a joint is escaping from a painful physiologic reality and able to focus on non-somatic reality. I’m seeing a lot more of my elderly patients taking up smoking weed as they find it less problematic than legal opiates for pain reduction. Cannabis also can be psychedelic although this seems to depend on the underlying idiosyncratic neuroanatomic/neurochemical organization of the user as some patients I’ve talked to never report hallucinating on cannabis and just find it makes them sleepy which is what they need before bed. Given the incredibly widespread anandamide systems in the human brain (anandamide is the brains own THC), it’s not surprising that THC has such widely diverse effects on people.
    Another drug that has such similar diverse effects is nicotine which can act either as a stimulant/relaxant depending on pre-nicotine ingestion mental state. I’ve found that about 10% of the population seems to function so much better on nicotine that they can’t stop smoking. I’ve been successful in converting many of these people to nicotine patches or inhalers, a much safer nicotine delivery system.
    Governments are very down on psychedelic drugs as they want people to just see the official reality tunnels and allowing people a more intense experience of the whole of objective reality is something which they use the coercive power of the state to prevent. Western governments are as determined to prevent people from exploring non-sanctioned reality tunnels as the previous communist governments were to prevent any contagion of the population by US concepts of freedom and individual rights.
    So, when it comes to “escaping reality”, I’ll only tolerate this expression if it is consistent with objective pharmacologic reality. Actually, the primary means of the whole population of “escaping reality” (when used in the sense that stradivarius did) is through watching TV and going to movies. Given the low intellectual quality of the majority of hollywood fare, lighting up a joint and going for a walk is likely a far more productive “reality escape”.

  34. Heh, after awhile the manufactured reality becomes more real than reality, hence the above load of BS.
    Just another druggie pushing his drugs…after all, we are a society with a magic potion for everything.

  36. stradivarius, I won’t get into a long discussion of how the brain manufactures reality. A good place to start would be the book The User Illusion: cutting consciousness down to size by Tor Norretranders. There is ample neurophysiololgic evidence for how the brain creates reality which Norretranders explains in considerable detail. So, all “reality” is manufactured and the validity of an individuals reality tunnel is only as good as the match between their manufactured reality and objective reality. Generally poor matches in wild populations in individuals with incongruent personal and objective realities result in death.
    Moonbats live in reality tunnels that don’t correspond very well with objective reality in many areas. The only reason they’re still alive as a result is that they live in asylums for the reality-challenged (aka large cities) where the residents are allowed to manifest personal realities which have very little relationship with objective reality and still survive. Those whose primary personal realities correspond strongly with objective reality have a natural disdain for moonbats, but learning how ones brain creates personal reality is a very important research project hobbled by the illegal status of psychedelic drugs.

  38. Generally poor matches in wild populations in individuals with incongruent personal and objective realities result in death.
    Yes, no doubt why the drug addled migrate where the climate is more forgiving.

  39. Stradivarious needs to spend some time “expanding”…Peyote would be an excellent first choice. Must be hard to live in such fear…Strat is an example of the old Conservative mind set who has swollowed the establishment propaganda whole and only relates drug users as being brainless goofs. Edgar Allan Poe was an opium addict that wrote some of the most stunning work of literature ever; while on opium. Jimmy Hendrix revolutionized electric guitar playing; high on LSD…Marihuana might still be illegal because many claim it brings them closer to god, closer to realities of life and happy with what the possess: This goes again’st a consumerism society.
    Fresh thinking like Rand Paul who very recently said “Kids should not be thrown in jail because of drugs” is what we need in the “realities” of the 21st century.

  40. Loki: As a long-time smoker your comments really resonated with me – Nicotine is an amazing drug – Able to stimulate thought or calm the mind depending upon one’s state of mind at the time. Likely explains its addictive properties.
    On a topical note – Are you familiar with Terence McKenna? He had many amazing insights into the mind expanding properties of psychotropic mushrooms.

  41. Interesting how attached druggies are to their crutch. Certainly not much wonder drugs and crime go together, they’d sell their grandmother to get drugs. No doubt so they can make sense of the Hendrix’s noise and Poe’s gibberish.

  42. Yes, I’m familiar with Terrence McKenna and will likely order some of his books now as his theory of “The stoned ape” is very similar to an idea I had decades ago that many aspects of primitive art were the recording of geometric hallucinations caused by various naturally occurring substituted tryptamines. Every primitive culture has had its sacred plants and the “drug war” began around the time of the origin of Christianity which resulted in alcohol being the only consciousness altering drug permissible in Europe until the advent of coffee and tobacco.
    The increased acuity of visual perception with psilocybin is quite real having been replicated in multiple experiments where volunteers are given either placebo or psilocybin and asked to figure out the letters of a line of text that has a vertical line drawn through it and the bottom part of the letters cut off. Those individuals given psilocybin performed much better at this task than individuals given placebo. I can see low dose psilocybin facilitated directed hallucinations as being very useful in a number of areas.
    When it comes to nicotine, there are far safer delivery systems for nicotine now available. I smoked long enough that even 35 years after I quit, smoking the occasional cigarette brings back memories of sitting in my first year university classes with a coffee and a cigarette getting my first nicotine buzz of the day (back in the days that one was allowed to do this). Now it’s nicotine patches or nicotine inhalers as the primary means of administering nicotine. Wearing a nicotine patch for 24 hours/day also greatly increases dreaming and richness of dreams.
    To paraphrase Dr. Alexander Shulgin, our society is the only one in existence that has actively criminalized the psychedelic assisted exploration of consciousness. John Lilly, who was primarily known for his attempts to communicate with dolphins, viewed LSD as a wetware meta-programming tool and his book Programming and Metaprogramming the human biocomputer is a very interesting view into how cognitive science was moving in the 1960’s prior to statist repression prohibiting any further experimentation in this area.
    The only exceptions to this criminalization of psychedelics are the Native American Church which has peyote as its sacrament. There were a number of “religions” created in the 1960’s which attempted to utilize either LSD or psilocybin as their religious sacrament, but statists have criminalized this legitimate expression of religious freedom while allowing far more destructive “religions” such as islam and scientology to flourish.
    Psychedelic drugs are used privately by a surprising number of creative people and scientists given their creativity enhancing potential. The polymerase chain reaction occurred to the discoverer while he was on an acid trip. Psychedelics are non-addicting as daily use of LSD results in nothing happening after about 3-4 days which is a very curious form of tolerance. Use of LSD to treat alcoholism was a very promising therapy until the government decided to outlaw any use of psychedelics. Instead we get the Vancouver sites which give alcoholics limited numbers of free drinks every hour as a “harm reduction” model. Still has all of the numerous toxic effects of alcohol and all that one has now done is to get the alcoholics off the streets. With LSD treatment, they might instead be functioning members of society; then again that would put members of the disability industry out of work.

  44. I would assume that you have never used tobacco or alcohol Stradivarious?
    What a smug, self important prig you are.

  45. Loki – As an adjunct to your reply (thanks, BTW) there are scholars and writers who claim that the Old Testament’s “manna from heaven” as consumed by the Israelites during their exodus from Egypt had hallucinogenic properties.
    Topical read: “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross”, published in 1970 by John Marco Allegro.
    I would add that the miter as worn by the Pope, cardinals and bishops is really a metaphor for the sacred mushroom. Not to mention an element of phallic symbolism common with the mushroom.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation