Grow It In The Sun

The Rivers Run Through It

We love Sunbud. It's healthy, sustainable, yummy, and not insane. But too much of a good thing is a bad thing. The failures of regulation achieved by the federal terror campaign against legalizing marijuana have created an outdoor policy nightmare in rural California, spreading from public land to private forestland, which is increasingly purchased just to conceal gigantic greenhouse and outdoor pot grows. Here's the latest dope, from Eureka's North Coast Journal. The good news is that every Goliath may get a few good Davids, and they're stepping up. On the radio and in blogs and press, greed grows are under attack.

 Here's the Humboldt County Sheriff's slide show of outdoor growporn.

It's so bad the Humboldt County Sheriff has batsignalled the feds for help. That's bad.

 

hat tip to Kym Kemp and Lost Coast Outpost as well as the Journal.

 

California renews renewable energy, Yay!

Our fabulous castles of electricity until now have shined on death: the death of creatures fossilized into coal and petroleum hundreds of millions of years ago so we could burn them for electricity and comfort in our industrial age. Transformed by heat and pressure over time, the so-called fossil fuels are better understood as batteries of stored energy, which are used once, and discarded into the atmosphere.

This means we need renewable energy before we run out of it, duh. It also means we must use less of it, because we and our world's remaining life forms won't become valuable fuels for 200 million years. What will our children burn in the meantime?

This is what makes renewable energy policy so important. We must subsidise its development (like China and Germany do), because of course it's more expensive! We're making it from scratch, having strip-mined what Gaia already made for us.

California's Public Utilities Commission has taken a rare stance against PG&E in demanding that electric companies pay decentralized solar power producers for their continuing contributions to the state electrical grid. It's wonky policy, but California continues to lead the nation in recognizing how doomed we are if we don't evolve.

If conserving energy doesn't become a way of life, we'll die of hyper-consumption. We at Grow it in the Sun would much rather light up and live, wouldn't you?

The Green Rush: Economic Boom—Ecological Bust

Our friend Kym Kemp of Humboldt's indispensable Redheaded Blackbelt blog has published an informative essay by another friend of Grow it in the Sun, Kyle Keegan. Follow this link for important reflections on the obligation each of has to walk our world consciously and conscientiously.

Happy New Year, may we all grow in the sun.

Please, industrialists, may we have more green pot, please?

 The good people at Tea House Collective got a sweet shot of expository prose from the East Bay Express last week, in this informative and fun cover story. We won't spoil it for you, just read it and rejoice in the re-awakening of Conscious Cannabis.

Oh okay, one key quote from researcher Evan Mills, whose work we featured below: "I don't have sympathy for cannabis advocates who say that the energy use is too small to worry about--it's not."

Some of the photos illustrating the story come from Southern Humboldt native Kym Kemp, whose excellent blog Redheaded Blackbelt is an endlessly fresh source of information and inspiration in all things green and wonderful. She's a medical cannabis writer, and a good one. Happy reading!

Guerrilla Grows: The Ugly Side of Outdoor

The problem of illegal growing on public lands has gotten a lot of attention in the past couple of years. California Watch has turned attention to the problem of guerrilla grows on private land.

Much like the grows on public lands, illegal growers hijack the land and the water, clearcutting trees, sometimes even bulldozing vegetation, diverting water from springs and creeks, poisoning wildlife and water, and causing untold amounts of environmental damage.

Unlike the public lands, which has advocates both governmental and volunteer to help patrol and clean up the damange (though admittedly, not nearly enough manpower or money to address it all), private landowners are on their own. They have to beg authorities for law enforcement, and manage the considerable cost and effort of clean up and restoration themselves.

The only long-term solution is legalization on the federal level. Even if California legalizes cannabis in 2012, the lucrative black market in other states will continue to encourage guerrilla grows and the horrific damage they create.

In the short term, within California, one answer is to know your grower. Find a collective that offers cannabis from small-scale, environmentally responsible farms. Ask your dispensary to carry sun-grown cannabis from these collectives. If you're buying in the grey market, ask the same questions. It's crucial to the land's health--and to yours.

The only thing that will end the damage is to end the demand. It's a national issue. Our land and water need legal and regulated cannabis.

A Year of Energy Disaster

In the past year we've seen:

Coal mining take dozens of lives and destroy mountaintops, while the toxic waste of its production breaks through its dams and destroy communities and ecosystems.

An oil rig disaster that has forever altered the ecology, economy and communities of the Gulf of Mexico.

And now, an ongoing nuclear disaster poisons people, land and water in Japan, with unknown future impacts upon the oceans and the planet.

The terrible events of Fukushima recall the world’s attention to nuclear energy. A sense of complacency had developed over the past few years. Chernobyl is more than twenty years past, and Three Mile Island nearly thirty. In early March, uranium was trading at an all time high, as the global nuclear industry prepared for a building boom. Obama, like Bush before him, said in his State of the Union address that the answer to the problems of greenhouse gas emissions is clean and safe nuclear energy.

Many people now assume that nuclear power is history, that after Fukushima the world will learn its lesson, and nukes will go away.

 Don’t count on it. Lobbyists from the nuclear industry have been swarming Washington these past weeks, and if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that folks inside the Beltway prefer the dollars of lobbyists to the will of voters.

Former California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore also sees nukes as necessary. "You can't run the grid that we have now and make the per capita carbon dioxide reductions you want without nuclear power." DeVore puts his finger right on the problem: we can’t run the grid we have now and reduce greenhouse gases. He leaves unspoken the demand for more grid power, with or without greenhouse gas—and the holy taboo against working to reduce per capita energy use.

 Two operating nuclear plants in California — Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, both built on our coast’s shaky ground — supply about 15 percent of the state's electricity. That’s 15% from just two of the hundreds of power plants in California. Nuclear power’s enormous capacity is one of its attractions. Shutting them down is a polital non-starter.

Current California law prohibits building more nuclear power plants here until the federal government comes up with a permanent solution for storing nuclear waste. That’s an issue deserving more attention, since the greatest danger of radiation emission at Fukushima comes from the huge amounts of stored spent fuel, not the reactors themselves. California also has a lot of spent fuel stored. For instance, the Humboldt Bay Nuclear Power Plant in Eureka was shut down in 1976 because the costs of a seismic retrofit were determined to be too high, yet its spent fuel is still stored at the site, precariously close to the seismically notorious “Triple Junction,” where California’s San Andreas fault slams into the Pacific Northwest’s even more destructive Cascadia Subduction Zone.

Whether it’s new plants or old waste we’re dreading, the menace of nuclear power isn’t going away. Not until our cultures change enough to force it to. Change requires concerted efforts at conservation as well as big investments in renewable energy.

What about beginning with conservation? What about examining our energy demands and eliminating unnecessary use? We don’t need more nuclear power or a larger grid. We need to reverse our ever-growing lust for power.

Here’s a great place to start conserving. It takes 1000 kilowatt-hours of energy to run a 1000W halide light for the average ten week indoor growing cycle that produces a single pound of indoor marijuana, as well as a ton and a half of global-warming effluent. Where does that energy come from? In California, it comes from a fossil-fuel burning plant, a nuclear plant, or a fish-killing ‘green’ hydropower dam.

Or it could come free, from nature's safe source. Grow it in the sun.

“Energy up in Smoke”

Indoor marijuana cultivation uses one percent of all grid energy in the United States. In California, it’s three percent of all energy use, and eight percent of household use.

Evan Mills, Ph.D., a staff scientist and energy analyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (co-winner with Al Gore of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), has put together the evidence in “Energy up in Smoke: The Carbon Footprint of Indoor Cannabis Production”. It’s impressive number crunching, from vast national numbers down to a single joint: producing one joint of indoor is like driving 15 miles in a 44 mpg car, and emits about two pounds of CO2 gas, the major culprit in climate change. That’s two pounds of greenhouse gas per joint, or more than a ton per pound.

Here in California, the majority of grid energy comes from natural gas-fired power plants. Natural gas has long been considered the cleanest burning, and therefore the best option in fossil fuels. But new studies shatter this rosy assertion. Natural gas extraction releases so much methane and other pollutants that the CO2 emission ‘savings’ in burning natural gas are actually no savings at all. And then there’s ‘fracking,’ the hydraulic fracturing of underground rock formations to release more natural gas. Fracking has devastating effects on ground water and ground stability, and is poisoning the water supplies of communities throughout gas drilling areas.

 As California seeks full marijuana legalization, and more states adopt compassionate use laws, energy consumption for cultivation will grow. One reason for this is the desire to control sources of cultivation. California cities like Arcata and Eureka, situated on the foggy coast of Humboldt County, require that only cannabis cultivated within the city itself may be sold in the cities dispensaries, which essentially mandates indoor growing. Similar statutes in southern California cities have the same effect. Last year, in the city of Berkeley’s medical marijuana committee discussions of options for a new dispensary, cultivation within the city was deemed preferable, and indoor was considered the only viable production method.

This decision undermines Berkeley’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Its 80/50 initiative (to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050) won’t get anywhere on carbon reduction if it licenses indoor factory farms. Indoor mega-grows are projected to become the largest single electricity users in both Berkeley and Oakland.

The time to address these issues is now, as pot activists in California draft the 2012 legalization initiative. The cannabis industry has a chance to get it right for the environment, from the start of legalization, by simply saying ‘grow it in the sun.’

Cannabis's Babylonian captivity

A heaping helping of gratitude to everyone who helped us make our Pot Palace Expo booth a great success. Thanks too to the many people who stopped by to learn more about where cannabis comes from.

We're opposed to industrializing production of our beloved herb, whether indoors or out. This excellent LA Times article sums up the strange history of pot production caused by cultural norms, which are continuing to evolve in a very different direction. We hope cultivation will follow regulation back down the path to sanity, and soon.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-indoor-pot-20101015,0,1264632.story

 

If I drive a Prius is it OK to smoke indoor?

Let's suppose that billionaire Bill Gates personifies self-interested conventional thinking. Even Bill Gates thinks carbon offsets are a crock—yet it's the crock proposed by the cities of Oakland and Berkeley to contain their indoor pharma-factories’ industrial pollution. It’s a dark day in California when the richest monopolist in the world is outtasight ahead of Berkeley's curve. How can this be?

Gates made a knowledgeable presentation at Ted, the policy-wonk gabfest, that’s discussed on this New York Times blog. He surveys the disproportionate challenges climate change creates for Earth's poorest people, and seconds Berkeley's official goal of reducing carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, with good explanations for why it's necessary, and why carbon offsets don't really help.

Then he waxes optimistic about his investment in new forms of nuclear power. Well, he was on a good roll, anyway.

 

 

 So what's wrong with carbon offsets? They're the off-gas of cap-and-trade pollution rights, which were invented by corporate environmentalists in the Senior Bush adminstration as a way of giving coal-power companies more money for causing less acid rain (as Smithsonian rather naively explains). But like so many well-intentioned Frankenstein monsters, cap-and-trade took on a life of its own. It became the American alternative to what the rest of the world wanted to do to curb greenhouse gas emissions, which was to levy a carbon tax on the destructive smoke coming out of chimneys. Pollute less, pay less tax, was the idea.

Sounds Communist, doesn't it? Once the commies were banned from discussions of the issue, Europe agreed to go our route instead, with controversial results. The problem in a nutshell is that cap and trade financializes a real problem, and creates unreal and often fraudulent solutions to it, as brought to you by Goldman Sachs. To be more precise, it's a croc.

 

Is it still pollution if I don't care?

It's not news that Americans consume more electricity per capita than anyone anywhere but the richest petro-desert sheikdoms. It's becoming news that our filthy coal-fired electrical plants--which cause star-blotting particulate pollution across the West, acid rain in the Midwest and East, and smog everywhere fumes can fester--also release killing quantities of vaporized mercury. Almost half our nation's electricity comes from burning this stuff.

But did you know that even after filthy coal has been cashed into dirty air, we're left with mountains of ash that, until now, no one's known or cared what to do with? Alternet has a story on more than three dozen coal ash piles in 21 states known to be polluting water supplies.

Don't forget, we get the coal to poison the atmosphere by literally removing mountaintops and landfilling watercourses below them. But no worries! Research has been ongoing for decades to . . . somehow . . .   squirt our prodigious quantities of coal-powered CO₂ greenhouse gas into the ground, where it'll be safe, okay?  That research will continue to continue. As Star Wars military spending shows us, you never have to achieve results if you do enough research.

And while research continues, Oakland plans to create the biggest electrical user in the city to grow weed with imitation sunlight.  Hey,  shouldn't we  do some research on that?