You and I have spent so much time
and effort defending cannabis
from pretty much everybody.
First, we had to explain to people cannabis
was medicine and not an addictive drug. And
then we had to illustrate that stoners were
not necessarily lazy or unmotivated.
We have vision and take action.
We had to prove to our politicians that
it somehow would benefit them just to even
get it normalized. And now with all the
state laws favoring indoor cultivation,
we have to consider the very real issue
that cannabis cultivated indoors
might be bad for our environment,
electrical grid stability,
the cannabis economy, and the cannabis community as
well.
Ouch.
That's just not something I wanna think about.
If you're listening to this episode, you are
already a good person in my book. I
imagine lots of folks might skip this shaping
fire episode
simply because they don't wanna think about how
much energy cannabis consumes.
But being a cannabis
enthusiast means looking at everything
to do with our favorite plant.
And having the backbone to know when decreasing
our carbon footprint,
emissions
and fertilizer runoff is a very important consideration.
Yes, we will mostly be talking about indoor
cultivated cannabis today, but outdoor and greenhouses
have some energy aspects to consider too.
Whether you are an environmentalist,
an outdoor cultivator,
an indoor cultivator looking to decrease your bills,
or looking to make a case to start
growing outdoors,
this episode is for you.
If you wanna learn about cannabis health, cultivation,
and technique efficiently and with good cheer, I
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Venmo
at Shango Los.
You are listening to Shaping Fire and I
am your host Shango Los.
Welcome to episode 120.
My guest today is doctor Evan Mills.
Evan has an exceptionally
prestigious resume and you can read it fully
on his website. Here are some highlights.
Doctor Evan Mills is a retired senior scientist
at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
one of the world's leading research centers on
energy and environment.
He continues his collaborations
with the lab as an affiliate and is
also a research affiliate with the Energy and
Resources Group at UC Berkeley.
He consults widely for private industry and the
public sector. He has published 372
articles and reports, including contributions to 17 books
and has spoken in 21 countries.
In 02/2007,
Evan shared a Nobel Peace Prize as a
member of the United Nations Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change.
Evan has worked as an energy and environmental
systems analyst on projects ranging from local to
global scales.
In the mid nineteen eighties, he studied and
taught about green buildings before the term was
in vogue. He received a master's of science
degree in 1987
from UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group and
a PhD in 1991
from the Department Environmental and Energy Systems Studies
at Lund University in Sweden.
While in Sweden, he worked closely with the
Swedish State Power Board and the Swedish National
Board for Industrial and Technical Development on national
energy planning projects.
His specialties
are energy efficiency in buildings and industry
and the intersection of energy technology,
global climate and risk management.
Evan frequently writes for popular and trade publications
including Forbes, The LA Times, Slate, Salon, Technology
Review and The Washington Post.
And his work has been covered pretty much
everywhere including the Atlantic, Bloomberg, The Economist, The
Financial Times, High Times, National Geographic, Nature, Popular
Science, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, and Wired.
Evan now lives in the Redwoods on the
Northern California Coast and is an organic vegetable
gardener.
And as a novel side note, when Evan
was a kid, he attended the Halloween parties
that Cheech and Chong threw for their kids
in nineteen seventies Los Angeles.
Today, we will be discussing the ways that
cannabis cultivation
uses energy and the places you can save
money by changing to energy efficient alternatives.
During the first set, we will talk about
the overall size of the energy footprint of
US Cannabis cultivation
and then dive into lights, HVAC and other
big ticket energy users.
During the second set, we dig into drying,
transportation,
packaging and retail along with a bunch of
other sleeper ways that we waste energy cultivating.
And we finished the episode looking at cannabis
delivery and energy efficient cultivars
along with the market and political bias in
favor of indoor cultivation and the possible impacts
that interstate commerce and national legalization
might have on cannabis energy use.
Welcome to Shaping Fire, Evan.
Hey. Good to be here. Thank you. Awesome.
So Evan, like, let's let's let's repeat what
I've already said in the introduction once since
you work have worked for with so many
heavies
that that you are here on your own
capacity
as a consultant
and that,
this work and your opinions today do not
necessarily
necessarily reflect those of the companies or institutions
with which you have worked for, and you
are here talking just for
yourself.
Yeah. That's fine. Thank you. Excellent. So, you
know, it's fun to be chatting with you.
Your your name has been on my lips
for for, like, almost a decade. Right?
Doctor Dominic Korova turned me on to your
work in, like, 2014 or '15 or so.
And, I've been repeating it and watching it,
and and watching for more ever since. So
then last week when I saw your paper
come out, it was like it was like
a long missed returning friend, Evan, even though
I don't know you. And so, it was
nice to, connect with you via email, and,
I really appreciate you being here today. So
thank you. Oh, my pleasure. Dominic put together
a great book a couple years ago with,
you know, 30 or so chapters from different
experts all around the cannabis industry, all kinds
of issues. And we had the pleasure of
contributing a chapter to that as well. And
I I have read it. It it was
excellent. And and then when when when,
when Dominic put it out, he was actually
on shaping fur, and we talked about that
at the time. And I bet you your
name came up during that episode as well.
So,
so but we are here today because you
have recently updated your work.
You have a newly published paper in One
Earth called energy intensive indoor cultivation drives cannabis
industry's expanding carbon footprint,
which
pretty much,
like the sauce is in the title. Right?
We know exactly where we're coming from. And
so today, I was I wanted
to invite you on the show so that
we can tease out,
all of the places or or at least
many of the places
where cannabis companies can reduce their energy usage
and,
and and and reduce their carbon footprint.
Now there there's no question,
you know, reading your paper
that you're making the case
for outdoor cannabis, of which we are huge
proponents for here on shaping fire.
We also recognize
that many of the companies have got themselves
into the indoor side,
financially, and they might not be able to
transition out right away. And so maybe in
the interim,
we can at least start with
electrical
being used less often
and start moving us all, the industry as
a whole, in the right direction.
Yeah. I appreciate the the vantage point. And,
you know, I'd say for,
for me in particular, you know, my home
field, my work is around,
energy management, energy analysis, energy efficiency. And where
I started here on this spectrum,
cultivation, and and we can achieve whatever we
need to by doing that. And over time,
I found how,
virtually impossible that is to really get to
a zero net carbon. So I I didn't
start with the assumption that outdoor was the
only really tenable, you know, direction. I I
came to that very slowly because it it
again,
my my hammer is energy efficiency and all
my solutions all my nails are energy efficiency
usually, you know, in the world. But this
is a very different
kind of, a very interesting rich,
you know, sandbox here where there are a
lot more options. The other thing just to
to, footnote is that we, it's important to
talk about energy
as distinct from electricity.
It's it's not, often the case, certainly not
always the case that, a given grow,
outdoor or indoor
is all electric. There's fossil fuel used in
a myriad of ways. That doesn't mean in
every single grow. But like in my study,
where I'm looking at the whole life cycle,
not just the cultivation phase,
half of the total energy nationally at the
end of the day is fossil fuel Yeah.
Directly, not even including
the fossil fuel going into the electricity production
itself.
So, it's important to think in terms of,
think think widely and look widely at at
where energy in all its forms might be
used. Excellent. Thank you for pointing that out
because I I definitely used the word electrical,
earlier. And and and honestly, I will probably
slip and use it again. So I I
appreciate you,
using that clarity, and and I apologize for
when I I missed it again. It's fine.
It's a it's a common thing. And and,
you know, maybe another thing just to layer
in here and we can come back to
it later if you want is that, you
know, while that, like you said, the title
of the paper,
you know, flags or signals, one of the
main findings, it is nuanced wording and that,
on the one hand, outdoor is not intrinsically,
the solution or fully sustainable.
And indoor, you know, similarly, there's a big
spectrum of emissions and things you might get.
So, there there can be plenty of problems
around energy and sustainability more broadly with outdoors.
So it's not simply a matter of flicking
a switch and,
going to,
especially the current
industrial scale paradigm of of outdoor. It's more
than that would would be needed to really
address
climate, you know, let alone all the other
environmental things that we're aware of. I was
really surprised in the new paper of all
the places
that you illustrate
where,
energy is being used intensely
and and is a is a place that
we can either decrease our energy use or
or get rid of it completely by replacing
it.
I actually find more interest in that than
even in the lights. But but let's go
ahead and start with that because everybody pretty
much considers that to be the elephant in
the room is is that when we when
we bring the plants indoors,
we have to create a man made sun.
And and we do that by throwing lots
of jewels at them.
And,
instead of me,
trying to tease out the specifics,
I know that you have answered this question
many times. So I'm just gonna kinda hand
you the mic and ask you to describe
the problem
with using so many so much energy in
cannabis indoor cultivation.
Sure. And and we can start with lights
because that's where you wanted to start, and
it and I agree it's where everyone goes.
And some people, okay, say on the layperson
end of the spectrum thinks that's the only
energy use, which is
fine, you know, mistake or whatever for general
public. But, it's big. Lighting is big. We're
talking I mean, of course, there are different
lots of different growing
context. There's a spectrum, so you can have
the the plant factory that's windowless
and all the lumens, all the photons are
electric. You can, of course, have, I hate
the term mixed lighting because it's like jargon
and, you know, regulators use it, but let's
call them greenhouses.
And greenhouses can be also no electric photons,
or they can have some electric photons, and
most industrial,
cannabis greenhouses do use electric lighting. But anyway,
lighting is,
you know, loosely like a third of the
total energy use, total carbon footprint. It totally
depends, you know, where you are and and
what,
genetics you have and,
what what the facility is like. But, you
know, lighting is big.
And whether it's LED or HID or some
or,
something else,
nickel metal halide, it's, it's still a lot
of energy, you know. And, people look at
the LED as this panacea, and and it's
rolled out,
reflexively
all the time in conversations. And I'm a
big fan of LED. My house is all
LED. You know, it's what's not to like?
No mercury, you know, energy savings. But,
remember that to replace,
let's call it a thousand watt HID
light, it's a that's a 600 watt LED.
It's still like a small floor heater under
your desk. It's incredibly energy intensive and you
put, you know, few thousand of those in
a big greenhouse and you need a lot
of air conditioning to deal just with the
heat off the LEDs. So, yes, it saves
energy,
but it only moves the needle so much
and it's only addressing a third of the
energy use. And, yes, you may get some
cooling savings. You may also get some increased
heating energy need.
So it's, you know, it's a system. We
always think about buildings as systems, whether it's
a, you know, a school or an office
or a cannabis grow. Their leg bone's connected
to the hip bone, and lighting affects cooling,
and and, you
know, all the uses are are connected in
important ways.
So I I don't know. I hope that
that's helpful as far as lighting. Can talk
more about it. There's some I've got a
follow-up for you. Yeah. Sure. So so when
we go to conventions,
the lighting manufacturers,
are continuing to impress us with or or
seeking to impress us with,
their,
increased energy conservation,
and things are getting better, and and every
new model is going to to use
less energy
and and save the cultivators
pocket money which is great
do you see
exploratory
science in cultivation lights that is forthcoming that's
actually going to be helpful? Because I get
what you're saying right now about LED
is yes. Yes. It's better than metal alloyed,
but really, it's not moving the needle that
much.
And and if if I wanted to keep
my LEDs and wanted to keep running indoor,
my first response would be, well, the technology
is almost there, and and it's about to
be better. And so we just need to
put our energy into LED research
instead of trying to move us outdoors.
Yeah.
This is a broader, you know, just kind
of conceptual
problem or challenge or opportunity depending how you
wanna look at it in energy management writ
large. There there's never a silver bullet. I
mean, data center,
cement factory, cannabis grow, house, either the it's
it's
a orchestra,
you know, of of measures that you need
and want and
are prudent to pursue for all kinds of
reasons. So there's never one thing that's gonna
solve a problem. There really isn't.
Even, you know, you look at a car,
like an electric car, well, there's, you know,
30 different energy efficiency measures going on within
that that car. So there's always a constellation
of things.
With lighting,
just to footnote a little bit what we
were saying a minute ago, it's also you
know, it's very,
I don't like the word strain. I know
everybody uses it, but it's not actually the
word that's used in agronomy, you know, more
broadly. They're they're they're crops, you know, or
they're cultivars,
cultivars.
There's interest they're interesting papers, not enough of
them, but I in my paper figure five
brings the data together from one of the
studies, and they looked at,
multiple strains under LED versus HID lighting, and
it's sobering
to see, that some of them don't save
any energy. They're much very little energy, and
others save a lot. And so there's like
a factor of strain
and genetics and cultivar in
the lighting performance. Also,
there's a problem, again, more broadly in energy
called the take back effect that, actually gets
kind of embraced by
climate deniers and so on a lot by
saying that, well, if we save energy in
one place, we're just gonna use more somewhere
else, and I'm not that person. I don't
subscribe to that, and the evidence doesn't support
that. But
you do see a lot of places where
cannabis grows, and you'll you know, in the
trade literature, you'll see the advertisements from the
lighting manufacturers
brighter than the sun, not just as bright
as. And people will
increase
the the DLIs
and increase their yields, and so we have
to think about energy per unit yield rather
than energy per square foot and so on.
But it is often happening that people, because
they're saving so much money
on lighting energy bills, that they will pump
more light in. And so that's not the
expected,
you know, behavior with energy efficiency. And so
one has to look carefully
at how much energy is being saved and
how you're measuring, you know, those savings.
So it's just a little bit more in
light. You can steer me back around if
I if I, didn't actually answer your question.
No. No. That that's a good answer. So
my follow-up question
now I recognize
that,
that you are here to raise the flag
of using too much energy,
and it isn't necessarily
also your mandate to solve them all
and to solve the policy questions behind them
as well. So so with that in mind,
I'm still gonna ask you a solutions policy
question,
just because you have had this conversation with
many people, and perhaps you have heard something.
But,
you know, you're you're not, you know, you're
you're you're a friend of cannabis,
and and,
you're aware of the indoor outdoor cannabis debate
about quality.
And,
you know,
I and generally the guests on this show
loved, you know, we stand with sun grown
flower as have as having a wider,
aroma profile
and, healthier plants and, you know, more resilient,
higher yields, all all of this kind of
business. But there is something,
that is quite special and unique about,
flower that is grown indoors. It's aesthetic value.
And also to get,
outdoor cannabis
that competes with the quality of indoor,
there are only a handful of places in
the country that can do that naturally.
And and and so a lot of people
just aren't interested in this, discussion at all
because
they want to grow
the best cannabis in their region, and they
don't live in Garberville.
Right?
And so, and so people say, hey. I'm
I'm going to turn to my indoor.
Do you have any idea of how we
can resolve the the people wanting to grow
good cannabis in places where the weather is
not Northern California?
Yeah.
Great question.
It's so important.
And
some of the answers are counterintuitive,
I think, and I don't pretend to have
all the answers, but it's it's such an
important line of conversation. And and, if you
you probably have already, but if not, you
know, I think a whole show on really
drilling into the quality question is important. I'm
I'm,
you know, there's a lot to it. Right?
What defines quality? There's, you know, the visual,
there's the aromatic, there's the medical effect, there's
the inebriation effect, and there's so many vectors
of quality. They're all legitimate. I mean, they're
all things people are seeking, just like a
good wine.
But there is debate there for sure. I
mean, there's a lot of and including in
the science literature looking at CBD profiles,
that, you know, outdoor is not necessarily inferior
at all
by, you know, many metrics. And and when
you look at and I'm not saying it's
superior either. I'm just saying
one can't just have, like, a blanket
concession,
you know, that indoor is superior.
And certainly when it comes to potency, I
mean, that itself is a whole hour. Right?
And, you know, is 35%
higher quality than 25%, you know, is is
that really how we look at this?
And obviously, when you're making oil, then that's
not or any kind of extract, right, that
that's not even the thing anymore.
So higher potency
to me is one of the weaker
arguments. You know, certainly,
aesthetics are there.
Going back to what we were saying a
few minutes ago, you know, there is this
spectrum of growing environments and you have people
like, you know, Jeremy Moberg out out there
in the Eastern East Of Washington
growing in, you know, I don't know the
right word, hoop houses or whatnot. Getting, you
know, extraordinarily beautiful, I think, you know, award
winning, cosmetically
flowers, and and I'm sure many other, you
know, people around. And like you said, some
people, are very successful, but it is an
art. It is not as easy as most
people think.
But I think, you know, that's doable. And,
I think also
there is the baked in assumption, you know,
in what you're saying, which is fair,
that everyone wants to be able to grow
it everywhere.
Does everyone grow pineapples everywhere?
Does everyone grow cranberries everywhere? Does everyone grow
kiwis everywhere? Does everyone grow, you know, corn
everywhere? I mean, I live on the Mendocino
Coast. I can't grow freaking corn. I'm not
gonna build a greenhouse to grow corn. You
know, you can't really succeed at that anyway.
Mhmm. So there is there is a kind
of swimming against the tide there. I did
a one of the many little calculations in
the paper was,
how much land area would it take to
grow
all of the cannabis, you know, 24,000
tons roughly of cannabis that Americans consume every
year in The US? And the answer is
0.003%,
three thousandths of 1%
of all US farmland.
So, you know, we could clearly grow all
the cannabis that Americans want and it could
all be,
you know, in almost, you know, the ideal
climate. I'm not saying that's happening tomorrow, you
know. That's a whole hour about interstate commerce
and Right. Right. Pros and cons of that
and so on. But, there is a kind
of a an implicit,
you know, requirement
that it be grown everywhere.
And that said,
I don't know. I mean, there is outdoor
cultivation in every state
And I don't you know, Alaska, you name
it. And I don't know, you know, what
the best producers in each state look like,
but there is a lot of
room there.
And I don't I'm not aware that anyone
has found, like, a medical
element that is only achievable by indoor, but
maybe that's there. And if there's a need
for medicine, you know, these things are are
all nuanced,
in all spectrums. And and if there's an
really a need that's demonstrated for indoor,
for for some particular reason, you know, then
that that should be looked at and supported.
And then it goes to what you were
saying a minute ago. So what do we
do here and how do we make that
more efficient?
Because also, you know, it's easy for me
to say, well, in a perfect world,
this cultivation more of this cultivation would be
outdoors than it is now. And and, you
know, remember, a lot of cultivation, not just
at small, you know,
artisanal scales, but at industrial scales is outdoor
already. And I know most of that's headed
for oil. But, anyway,
there's there's a lot Which is a shame.
Right? Like, it's it's really a shame that
so much of the outdoor is just, air
quotes, just headed for oil. I mean, oil
is honorable, but but it's it's it's really
amazing to me that people, treat
treat outdoor as such a
a a mediocre commodity. Yeah.
When when I go down to California,
I'm only interested in finding Northern California regenerative
outdoor to purchase, and they wanna put all
this
mass produced indoor shlock on me. And and
it's really surprising
that that the outdoor,
what I consider the higher quality regenerative stuff,
is discounted because people don't want it. It
astonishes me how that market dynamic
works. Yeah. Certainly, you know, one,
participant in this whole ecosystem are the budtenders,
and their level of literacy or interest in
the relative merits of the two in the
carbon footprint,
is, you know, small in almost all cases.
And of course, there's no product labeling, which
is ironic. Right? There aren't many industries that
have as much product labeling in the sense
of CBD profiles and THC and and and,
differentiation on cultivars. You know, you don't go
to the market and and have all the
different,
you know,
types of corn labeled by their cultivar. Mhmm.
Or, you know, there might be a little
bit of that. So, you know, that's an
issue. I think consumer awareness
I mean, we're getting away from the technical
into the human and into the consumer level,
but, you know, consumers are not aware,
you know, that one pre roll
emits, you know, 5,000 times its weight in
c o two. That one pre roll is
like driving 65 miles in the best plug
in hybrid that's out there, that one pre
roll is as much of a carbon footprint
as 300 cigarettes.
And,
I think things like that
are you know, consumer awareness is important.
People talk a lot about free markets and
markets functioning well and not needing regulation. Well,
one of those assumptions is that the consumers
have perfect information about everything and are making
decisions
with a full, you know, visibility of their
choices. And so that's,
you know, we're we're straying from the quality
issue, I guess. It's still, you know, it's
consumer choice, but there are a lot of
attributes and quality is one of them. And
you could also argue that the environmental footprint
is an element of quality,
and
a given consumer could look at it that
way or they could not. But, without knowing
what it is you, but not at all.
To to weigh it in. Yeah. Yeah. And
and you can't expect that they all ever
would, like, just like with everything else. I
mean,
it's, you know, consumers are not trying to
optimize our planet for environment.
You asked, you know, you asked a bit
about,
you know, lighting and then going beyond lighting.
And and so let's say lighting is roughly
a third and your mileage may vary a
lot. Mhmm. But, you know, there's heating, there's
cooling,
dehumidification
is huge. You know, the plants are, of
course, transpiring and releasing a lot of moisture.
And if you're growing hydroponically,
there's a lot of water coming out, you
know, around the plant,
and that, you know, obviously creates a big
risk of of mold and and,
other issues. And so there's dehumidification,
which is very energy intensive.
And then, you know, moving air, you know,
there can be thirty, forty, 50, 60 air
rotations in a in an indoor grow in
a in an hour. You know, by for
contrast, a house has, like, one
or two or half of an air change
per hour. Lot of energy moving
that air. You're you're irrigating. You have pumps.
You're,
possibly treating that water. You're possibly heating that
water or even cooling that water depending what
climate you're in. I bet down in Coachella
Valley, they have cooler, you know, water chillers
that are chilling, irrigation water.
And, if you have your own water supply,
you're pumping.
And, so just as far as energy uses,
and then there's curing. And then often there's
extraction on the site. And then,
you know, there's a lot of cold storage
now in the industry. There's, you know, vast
overproduction,
like,
vast overproduction in the industry. It's more well
documented in Canada than here, but definitely happening
here. And so that stuff, it's going into
refrigerators and freezers. And I'm just saying, like,
it's it's back to the earlier point. There's
no silver bullet, but all of these things
use energy. And they all have energy efficiency
options. You know, they're all
manageable to a point, and they should be.
You know, if they're used, they should be
done as efficiently as possible.
And so those are some of the ones
that are in my numbers. They're for people
who are concerned about, oh, Evans numbers are
too high. There's a heck of a lot
of things I left out because there were
no good data, you know, to include them.
And and there's a figure, I think figure
one in the paper that kind of has
this map of the the whole kind of
carbon system,
you know, around cannabis and which things I've
been able to quantify and which I haven't.
But, you know, on there's, you know, in
energy, there's, you know, managing your carbon dioxide.
There's UV disinfection. These are all things I
couldn't include odor removal,
not necessarily so much in cannabis, but, you
know, in other indoor ag, which I'm also
studying. There's soil steaming and cleaning soil to
use again. There's recovering water out of your
air conditioning or your HVAC,
exhaust stream.
In some climates, there's snow melting. Again, that's
more for other crops, but that really happens.
You've got your infield farm equipment, talking about
outdoor. There's data. People wanna use AI
and robots, you know. I mean, this industry
is automating very rapidly, right, again, not at
the small boutique grower level, but where most
of the cultivation happenings. And and as we
know, you know, AI uses a lot of
energy, and and mechanization uses energy, and instead
of human labor.
And, you know, the list kinda goes on,
but just to say, yes, there there is
a lot of other energy use besides lighting.
The good news is that they all are
manageable to one degree or another in terms
of of energy efficiency.
I've got one more question for you before
we go to the first break, Evan. And
and that is,
you know, you mentioned early on,
where moving from traditional lights to LED lights
is, you know, it's it's good to move
in the right direction, but it doesn't really
move the needle. Mhmm. And,
you know, you just gave us a a
healthy laundry list, and and we'll we'll we're
gonna dig into more of those during the
second set. But,
you know, you gave us a a laundry
list of all these other places that are,
energy intensive in the indoor cultivation
zone.
If
if we went and got
the energy efficient version of all of these,
the the energy efficient, you know, water cooler,
and the energy efficient,
you know, lighting, and the energy efficient,
you know, automation. And if we just went
down the list and got them all Yeah.
Would that move the needle or are we
just kidding ourselves? It would, but it won't
because It would, but it won't. Yeah. Because,
yes, you can kind of,
play god in the sense of specifying all
this stuff and then we haven't even talked
about solar yet. And, you know, you could
make a zero energy grow,
but
the
the obstacles to that, the the resistance in
the market itself
is enormous. I mean, the the surveys, the
market surveys done of the growers
say they want about a three year payback
time on any capital investments. More than half
of them want a three year payback time
or less.
So you can't even though that's 33%
of return on your investment, I wish I
could get that in the bank. Yeah.
That's not gonna get you far at all.
There was a big study that came out
in
Canada and there's been a few that have
tried to look, you know, we call it
kind of
techno economic studies, you know. How about this
technology? How much does this cost? How much
does it save? Payback.
And they're getting numbers like, you know, 10
to 20%
energy savings potential in cannabis grows. Again, you
can't just pick lighting.
Right? I mean, LED is hard enough to
get it to pencil, but, you know, you
have to look at all these end uses.
And so,
you know, while there may be a technical
potential for, let's just say, 75%
energy savings, which is what I stipulated in
02/2012 in the first paper,
no one who
is trying to earn
a profit, you know, who has investors
is gonna ever be able to get anywhere
near that.
And so and then with solar,
the problem is that the land use becomes
untenable.
I'm doing analysis now.
It's looking like cannabis facilities
depending on climate and
location
sorry, climate and facility type. And like you
said, you know, people wanna grow in harsh
climates,
right, because they wanna grow in their state
or in their town. So it can be
as bad or even worse than a hundred
times the roof area in solar.
And, you know, the best I've seen are
like 20 times the roof area or maybe
10 times the roof area. And so all
of a sudden,
you're using more land
than you would be with outdoor cultivation. And
and land sparing or land savings is one
of
the top,
you know, arguments that are used for, indoor
agriculture more more generally.
So there are these kind of real world
inconvenient,
you know, constraints around it. And meanwhile, the
industry is opposing not opposing, that's not fair,
but, you know, like the California Energy Commission
was putting out
public comment requests for energy efficiency standards
on indoor grows. And the industry comes out
of the woodwork with all kinds of opposition
to it, you know. And and the uptake
of LED is still pretty low, to be
honest, you know, in the market. And so
it's,
it's hard. You know, it's gotta be done
willingly or ideally it's done willingly. And if
it's not done willingly, then the regulators come
in. And people don't want any more regulation
on cannabis, but they won't do it on
their own enough, you know.
So it's it's rough.
And so I use the the term,
optimizing the suboptimal. Yes, you can optimize these
things. You can do better. And and Lord
knows people are. I mean, I'm not here
to criticize and say the industry is not
doing anything. The LED look, their heat pumps
are coming in.
People are, you know, trying to use AI
and things to optimize
water application,
minimize water use, and therefore, pumping energy. So
their efforts are being made,
but it's just,
you're not getting that far. And, so we're
optimizing the the suboptimal. It's so much more
elegant technologically and economically to grow outdoors,
if you can address the quality issue and
and still do that sustainably because there's plenty
of inputs,
you know, to outdoor cultivation. Alright. So hold
on up on that because I'm gonna pick
up on inputs in the second set. But
but I I want you to follow-up on
one thing before we go to commercial, which
is,
earlier in the set, I I said, okay.
If we if we do if we change
everything to
the energy efficient version, will it move the
needle?
And and and and and is is the
technology
in LED just not
up to the standard yet, and we're about
to. So we can just research our way
out of this. I have the same question
about the solar panels because,
solar has always been one of my things
that will save indoors in my head. Right?
Without
being a solar nerd. Just
hoping hoping that to be the case.
And,
do we see technological
advances
that are coming down the pipe in research
that might be able to increase our efficiency
so it wouldn't take 20 to 30 x
the the roof space in solar panels to
feed a cultivation
center?
Or or are
are are are we not,
foreseeing that in any kind of immediate future?
Yeah. I don't not in our lifetimes and
not not even in a longer time frame.
Not not sufficient at all. I mean, LED
is incredibly efficient.
Yeah. They're still working on it. I mean,
solar is incredibly efficient. The best panels are,
you know, there's been huge progress.
It'll continue, but it's not it's not of
this the magnitude
that you need. You know, you've got factors
of 10 and factors of a hundred improvements
you need here. I think there are other
domains like strain. See, there I go.
Genetics,
cultivar,
huge differences. You know, actually, that figure five
in the paper shows just
at the energy use for different cultivars,
and that's an area where you might get
50% savings
or 50% increase, you know, depending Sure. Where
you're moving between. So, you know, there there's
also a broader array of possible, things to
do rather than changing one widget for another,
you know, in your growing process. Mhmm.
That that's something to,
you know, to to look at. Excellent. Alright.
So let's go ahead and take a short
break, and we'll be right back. You are
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is energy and environmental systems analyst, Evan Mills.
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Welcome back. You are listening to Shaping Fire.
I am your host, Shango Los. And my
guest today is energy and environmental systems analyst,
Evan Mills.
So at the end of the last set,
we were talking about
the, all the different places that energy usage
can be tamped down or stopped in an
indoor cultivation environment.
And,
you know, I have heard people push back
before Evan and say,
we love cannabis. It makes life livable.
Why are you
harassing
cannabis cultivation
when there are so many other things,
that we should be harping on? And I
I know there's a logical fallacy there because
the fact the fact that we should be
doing something about energy in a different sector
doesn't really say anything about
not doing it in our sector, except for
the fact that we all love cannabis. Right?
But I'm heard I bet you've heard this
quite a bit. And and what do you
say when people push back like that?
Yeah. I I say that that it's and
and not or. You know, we
just like you, there's 20 ways to save
energy in a house. There's also 20 ways
to save energy in an economy or on
a planet. And we need, you know, we
need to reduce
carbon dioxide emissions by 90%
or more on this planet
to save ourselves, you know. And you can't
do that with one thing. You can't do
that just going after cars or steel making.
You know, it's just it's gotta be
it's gotta be taking every opportunity. And the,
you know, the dirty secret is that cannabis
is actually benefiting from a double standard, you
know. It's it's arguably one of the last
industries
to come
to energy efficiency and sustainable energy because, you
know, by virtue of the illicit market history,
it hasn't been,
exposed to or eligible for, you know, energy
tax credits or energy education even or utility
rebates,
and the, you know, the stealthy nature of
it, you know, and the low capitalization
doesn't provide the money to invest. You know,
those days are gone. And, you know, in
California where I live excuse me. In California
where I live, it's, you know, it's been
a quarter of a century since we've had,
you know, legal medical and since cultivation's been
done legally. We've had a lot of time.
The industry's had a lot of time to
figure out how to do this well. So,
I don't know if that that helps, but
those are those are some thoughts. I think
it also matters in aggregate, you know. If
this was a tiny tiny amount of energy,
tiny tiny, then,
yeah. Okay. Yeah. Why it shouldn't be a
priority. I mean, we only got limited time,
limited money. But it's really stunning how how
big it is and how big it's become.
In my
since my 02/2012
study,
the consumption of cannabis in The United States
has tripled.
So the cultivation has tripled. It's even more
than tripled
for subtle reasons. But the so the the
energy use now because I in the paper,
you know, I look at the per square
foot or per kilogram more importantly, you know,
energies, but I also look at the macro,
the national level. And the carbon footprint now
today,
even including all these uses that I've left
out,
is equal to that of 6,000,000
homes, 6,000,000 average American homes, 10,000,000 average American
cars.
It's more than than
crypto
mining. Wow. It's four times. I mean, I
was It's crazy. I think that's more than
crypto mining because it is hearing about crypto
mining,
inputs and and and and our cannabis is
more. And and so that's part of that
double standard. It it's gotten less attention than
it merits, not more I would argue. And
the other thing that was stunning is that
it's four times the energy use of the
pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing
sector.
And so
putting all other commentary and things aside as
a medicine,
you you know,
that needs to be owned. Mhmm. You know,
that needs to be owned. It's four times
the food and beverage
industry, which manufacturing, these are national statistics from
the US Department of Energy,
and that includes beer and wine production, food
and beverage.
And it's the same as this one is
stunning. Like, it's the same as all other
outdoor food crop production.
How can that be? Wait. All wait.
It is equal to all of the food
crop production in The United States? All of
it? Yeah.
That's an absurd
comparison. Because that's that's outdoors. I mean, only
1% of the cannabis carbon footprint
is due
to outdoor cannabis cultivation.
Right? So it's the indoor I mean, I'm
doing my next paper's on indoor growing of
cucumbers and tomatoes and lettuce and all the
other food props. They're a problem too. Not
nearly as bad as cannabis,
but they're, you know, hundreds of times more
energy than outdoor lettuce production, outdoor
tomatoes, and so on. So it's just the
energy intensity is so extraordinary.
And outdoor cultivation, you know, it uses relatively
little energy per acre. I mean, you've got
your tractors and your water pumps, and a
lot of food doesn't require, you know, drying
or curing and, you know, there's lots of
reasons why that is.
But cannabis is 300 times at least as
much energy as indoor lettuce is. So it's
just a lot more
energy intensive.
And, you know, and then for the those
are big, like, abstract numbers. I mean, they're
helpful because they're in context. I think the
comparisons actually help more. Yeah. They do. So
then the like, to to thicken that broth,
I also look at just to help this
be accessible, you know, or put in perspective.
What about from the consumer perspective? I mentioned
a little bit before about cars and driving.
Here's another one. If you look at the,
you know, different tiers of consumers, obviously. So
you look at the daily or near daily
user, which is, like, I don't know, 15,000,000
people or something in The States.
Their carbon footprint, if they consume just indoor
grown at average US conditions, outdoor grown, it's
a different story, they consumed indoor grown, their
carbon footprint from their cannabis consumption
is half of the carbon footprint of their
entire home,
meaning their fridge, their cooking, their heating, and
their cooling in average US conditions.
It's like three cross country road trips
per year in a in a plug in
hybrid.
It's like a %
of their annual food consumption. So if you
look at the energy footprint in their other
food, including meat eaters,
it's roughly on par with the carbon footprint
of their food consumption. And we're just talking
about, you know, a couple of grams, few
grams, whatever a day of of cannabis.
And it's not much better if you're a
healthy,
healthy vegan or vegetarian, but it's, you know,
the the difference is is even greater. Mhmm.
So
it's just it matters, you know. And and
we can't
we have to do everything. It's an all
hands on deck climate emergency, you know. And
so we just need to look at everything
and
it's not, you know, blaming and making bad.
It's, you know, more in the spirit of
what you were saying before. How do we
do better? What where are the inefficiencies?
And where where can we be more,
you know, have a a lower smaller footprint
in in this industry?
I wanna pivot,
a bit until to to start talking about
post harvest,
because like you said, we could spend hours
going through a detailed checklist of all of
the different,
parts of cultivation
where we could,
strategize differently or use different technology.
But,
it's it's it's arguably just as ugly
after,
the flower
has been dried and cured and is on
its way out the door too. Mhmm. One
of the things that, you know, I'm not
it's not like I'm the only one, but
but but one of my big pet peeves
are duvetubes.
And the the idea that we're we're, you
know, creating all these plastics and future microplastics,
and and then if it's a it's a
if it's a really high end, maybe a
a hash infused or something,
pre roll or Kanagar,
then then they're adding extra stuff. Like, they're
they're adding plastic based sticker,
and then, like, some kind of,
like, cool seal,
and and then maybe even a box around
the outside. Right?
And and and it's like, there's only, you
know, there's only a gram or two of
weed inside that joint, and there's all this
packaging
to give it vibe so that it sells.
And, I I imagine that the packaging is
just ugly in the numbers.
Yeah. There isn't a new paper I know
out about that in in particular, and it's
you know, I looked at the solid waste
streams. I mean, a lot of that is
is just plant residue, but it's also, you
know, spent mineral wool, and it's the plastics
for the cultivation. And it was, like, I
think, 15 times the weight of the flower
or something, and just that solid waste part.
You mentioned
vape cartridges and the like. And, you know,
one thing that's
so sad there is that vapes have
tiny lithium batteries in them, and they go
to the landfill. And lithium's recyclable and reusable,
and we have a crisis. And a lot
of the, you know, also the
people on the right, you know, like to
say that, you know, lithium is hurting the
environment and electric cars are bad and so
on. And the reality is we can recover
and reuse our lithium and that radically reduces
the environmental footprint of lithium, but we don't
wanna be sending it into landfills. There are
actually landfill fires that are starting now because
of all the the vape concentrations
and probably other lithium batteries too, but there
if you Google lithium fires landfill, you'll you'll
find
that that's happening just saying And they're nice
and evenly distributed throughout the landfill. Right?
Yeah. So it is a problem.
I think you you missed a couple of
important ones. I mean, there there's all this
solid let's call it broadly solid waste, and
what is the carbon footprint of that? And
some of that's included in the paper, and
there's certainly other literature, you know, as a
whole discipline of looking at life cycle assessment.
But, there's a kind of a gray zone
between
cultivation
proper and
putting it on the truck.
And that's, again, like I mentioned before, refrigeration,
curing,
and also,
downstream of that is extraction.
And that is a huge area
that we know almost nothing about
It just hasn't been studied and written about.
I really tried
to bring that into the analysis, and I
think it will be coming. I have I
know some people who are trying to do
more research on that now.
But I did do one vignette that's in
the supporting appendix of my report you can
get online. It's not in the national numbers
because I don't know on scale, but I
looked at supercritical c o two, which was
the one
extraction process I could find information on, and
it was stunning.
About,
the c o two footprint from the extraction
process
was about 50 times the weight of the
flour. So 50 kilograms of c o two
to the atmosphere per kilogram of flour going
into the process.
And
that
that, you know, is about actually, it's more
than that. I'm sorry. It's about a 50
times.
But it depends. So if you look at,
like, what is that as a fraction of
indoor
footprint? It's like a 10% increase, 10% adder
to the footprint we are talking about. But
if you look at outdoor, it's 30% increase.
Right? Because outdoors less less carbon intensive. Those
are percentages,
but it is
arguably an outdoor grower can make a bigger
marginal footprint on their,
impact on their footprint by improving the extraction.
And we just don't know. I mean, there's
so many processes and we don't know the
national magnitudes, but it's something that's just crying
out for
being looked at. It's not more important than
the things we're talking about. But again, everything
matters.
So I don't know if those are helpful
kind of conversations be you know, to address
your your question. I'm happy to keep going.
Yeah. It is. I I I would like
us to, move a little bit further down
the chain,
into,
so what it's grown, and it's stored, and
it is extracted, and it is packaged. All
things that we've hit on so far.
But let's let's pick it up from that
point.
So, at this point, we're in transportation. So
why don't you pick up the story line
there?
Yeah. So it it's harder to look at
transportation because, again, data, you know, one thing
vexing this whole process is there's no, you
know, as a result of national criminalization
and whatever else where funding is, there's there's
not nearly as good a data on cannabis
industry as there are on other industries. And
and, of course, part of that problem is
also the industry itself not
sharing, you know, its data. But, you know,
there are there are numbers out there and
ways to look at it. And so I
do look at that in the paper,
and it's, you know, there's lots of transportation
going on right through the whole life cycle.
I mean, there's upfront
transportation in the building of the facility,
of course, in the delivery of all the
inputs, the fertilizers,
the the plastics, the clones, the whatever.
And then there's people working and coming to
and fro. There's landfill.
So these things are broken out, you know,
in the report. And then, like you said,
at the end, of course, it goes into
a distribution chain. And, some people have complained
about
the regulatory landscape making this worse because cannabis
and this is gonna vary, you know, by
state and even by jurisdiction. Right?
But
the more times you have to move it
because of chain of not chain of custody,
but, like, the way the the, stewardship, you
know, is is dictated,
it may have to go to to one
level of distribution and then to another in
certain
processes in the in the, product life cycle
are separated to different locations, whatnot. But there's
transportation there. And, like, one one emerging thing
that I just mentioned, but there's no you
know, I couldn't get a handle on it
with numbers is, door to door delivery. I
mean, if you wanna really look, you know,
at the whole ecosystem, you have to look
at how it reaches consumer. That's the life
cycle.
And, certainly, door to door delivery is increasing.
What is the net effect? I don't know.
I mean, you can argue,
that it might save some energy and certainly
it's gonna defray some consumer trips. But, you
know, there's a lot of talk now about
the faster that people want their delivery, the
more carbon footprint there is because they send
single items out in a giant truck. And,
you know,
we've all had the experience
with Amazon, and you order something and it's
at your door the next day. And that
means,
you know, there were a lot of inefficiencies
in getting that to your door because they're
not they're not moving goods,
large amounts of goods in one trip to
one ZIP code. They're they're racing around with
it. One piece of data you dropped that
astonished me was that home delivery is 50%
of cannabis sales now. And and, you know,
I I I've never had delivery. Not that
I wouldn't have it, but I live on
on an island that's small in the Puget
Sound. Right? And
and but but I I was astonished that
there's so much of it just being delivered.
And and, you know, I kinda I kinda
simmered on this. Kinda like, okay. So the
the cannabis store is setting sending
somebody to me with my cannabis.
But but in the old days, I used
to go to the house of my dealer,
and so one way or another, somebody had
to drive.
And so,
I can see how we put this on
the industry as a whole. But to be
fair, I don't I don't think we should
we need to it'd be fair to put
that on indoor. No. Agreed. And I tried
to be careful in saying what is the
net effect of this because you you have
to look at the net effect and, you
know, the the what is the alternative, and
is that more or less carbon, and and
we don't know.
But, again, if something you know, if you're
taking a 2,000 pound car to deliver, you
know,
an eighth somewhere
and that's your only trip that you're making
as opposed to a person who's ideally integrating
that with some other trip, then there's obviously
a difference. But I don't know. Also, just
a small correction. So that 50%,
that's a thought experiment in the paper
to see what effect would that be. And
that would
if we got to 50%, we don't know
what share. I don't know what share somebody
would be doing. That's a good clarification. Thank
you. There's a lot of scenarios in the
paper that the the policy scenarios and the
market scenarios saying, well, what if the market
evolved in this way or that way, good
or bad? Just how much do certain things
move the needle? So that one, like, if
50% of sales were eventually conveyed by delivery
services,
total emissions would go up by about 4%,
okay, from the total carbon footprint. So it's
not the end of the world. This isn't,
you know, the big knob at all. But
we just have to look at all these
things and and also, like, which ones are
big and which ones are small. And the
only way to do that is to go
through, you know, exercises like this. So delivery
is not in my study in in the
in the numbers
because we don't know, how much of it's
going on. That's a good that's a good
clarification.
Is saved by,
what the difference is between
individual consumers going and getting it. Or, of
course, there's the whole home cultivation
part of this as well, which is it's
whole, you know, separate discussion and that's included
in the study.
And there, you, you know, you save a
lot of emissions. And so the if I'm
remembering right, the home cultivation is about half
the carbon footprint. Indoor cultivation is something like
half the carbon footprint of of industrial,
for a lot of reasons. And one of
them is you you, you know, you have
less transportation going on.
You have, you know, you're not landfilling, things
like that.
Well, that's an interesting spin, Evan, that I
did not pick up my first time through.
That's actually a decent I, you know, I
live in Washington where we're not allowed home
grow. We're, like, one of the only people.
There you go. Yeah. And,
you know, the the fact that,
it never occurred to me that that
individual
home,
you know, a four by four tent home
grow is going to be
more efficient
for my own cannabis needs than it is
for me to buy it from,
from a store and all the extra
energy that's used by that cultivation. I usually
just compare it the the indoor that I
would buy at the store versus my outdoor.
But the idea that my indoor,
is more energy efficient surprises me. Can you
tease that out a little bit more? Yeah.
Yeah. Sure. So so let's be sure to
say can be. Can be. Fair enough. Okay.
Uh-huh.
The devil's always in the details.
But, and and still,
from my numbers, it's still about half the
carbon footprint, which is still 2,000 times its
weight
in CO2.
So,
you know,
keep it in perspective. It's an improvement. I
mean, there we go back to your conversations,
like, but what can we do? You know?
And so this is something
ostensibly that would make a big dent in
it, but you're still left with a problem,
you know, that's extraordinary.
But the reasons are, you know, not everybody's
air conditioning.
There's less volume. You know, these indoor grows,
as you see, you know, in the big
pictures, the industrial ones, they're incredibly voluminous. And
so you're, you know, you're not just lighting
plants, you're heating and cooling and dehumidifying, you
know, giant volumes of air. So, you know,
that's a factor.
The
you know, it it also depends on the
efficiency. Like, if, you know, you're using a
heat pump at home and the indoor grower
greenhouse is using gas heating that's at 80%
efficiency,
you know, that makes a difference.
You don't have the interdiction or at least
to the same level. And, you know, interdiction
I mean, there's a lot of work upfront
in this paper of looking at how much
is grown versus how much makes it to
the market because what doesn't make it to
the market I'm not really changing the subject,
but, you know, it's a part of this
indoor grown thing. Again, it's
colorful. Right? And so,
you know, you have to take
all the energy used to cultivate
and divide that by the energy by the
quantity of cannabis consumed at the end of
the day. Right? That's the carbon footprint. You
have to count all the energy whether it
ends up in a given consumer's
product or not because that's c o two
to the atmosphere and it's energy being used.
And so, you know, you've got so many
forms of loss,
including at home. I mean, if you lose
a crop because you're
you're not skilled, you know, and all of
a sudden your four by four is full
of mold, you just wasted, you know,
sixty days of of electricity Mhmm. To get
there. But, also, you know, there's like the
product testing, which again, I'm not I'm not
against, but product testing results in destroyed cannabis
and you're not product testing when you grow
at home.
The the transportation some of the transportation involved,
there's no dispensary being lit up. I mean,
that's a small
contrib Oh, that was a nice pun. Did
you get that one? Yeah, I got that.
So those are some factors.
Not everyone has dehumidification.
You don't have the large amounts
of moisture all being concentrated. Maybe you dry
it in your shower and you don't have
showers off.
You don't have, you know, an electric drying
environment with dehumidifiers
running. So, you know, it's those are the
kinds of reasons why
it seems like the home footprint. And then
you're not going to landfill. You know, the
laws that require
and, you know, I'm not the laws that
require landfilling
also increase carbon emissions. It's very small, very,
very small, but I had to calculate it
and just look. And when you put a
lot of biomass
under the ground, especially if you have
wet, you know, soaked mineral wool full
of full of,
pest
fertilizer residues and roots and so on, you
get methane. You know? And that's a greenhouse
gas, and landfills are not not catching all
the methane. So, anyway, that's not happening with
with, home cultivation.
As long as you compost it and it
doesn't go anaerobic,
you know, you're okay. That is an interesting
thing you said about interdiction.
You know, raising
the,
the energy consumption of overall cannabis because,
they're like, hey. It was it was grown,
and and if they just take it and
let it mold in some closet somewhere,
that that it's not getting it's not meeting
needs in the market. And so it's they're
essentially
letting electricity usage mold.
And so so interdiction is not good for
the environment is a catchy idea.
And it's not yeah. And it's not just,
electricity.
It's the fossil fuel, but it's also Energy.
Yes. It's also all the but and beyond
energy, it's all the other inputs,
you know, to make the fertilizers and build
the facilities. You know, you have to allocate
all that energy somewhere.
So, on the same token,
you know, product contamination,
which is the responsibility of the growers,
results in destruction of product when that's intercepted.
And overproduction
is a gigantic problem, and that's not, you
know, the the,
you know, the government's fault. I mean, there
are probably certain ways to blame the public
sector on that, but but when you overproduce
and it doesn't get to market, I mean,
Canada Canada
is destroying,
you know, thousands of tons of cannabis every
year. How come? That's just cause they're overproducing
and you can't keep it, you know, more
than a year or so. It loses
THC and the CBD profile changes. Mhmm. And
I mean, that's a whole separate conversation of
why is this overproduction happening and I'm no
expert in it, but I'm observing it. And
I have not folded that into the study
because we don't know how much of that's
happening. But if you look, there's a lot
of it discussed in the appendix of the
paper, a lot of specific numbers and examples
and industry reports, and it's giant
amounts. And so,
you know, you you have to look at
you know, there's a lot of reasons that
more is grown than is consumed. And then
product recalls, you know, is something that happens,
and I don't think it's happening much, which
is arguably a
problem. Right. But, but it's not that's not,
again, a giant two digit effect, but it's
just one of you know, it's an example
of how to think about
the gross production versus the net consumption and
and who where that energy and and, emissions
burden gets allocated.
And then it brings us to an interesting
point about legalization, which is, you know, a
question
that is everyone wants to ask as well,
does legalization
at the national scale
solve
climate problem?
And we can talk about that now or
now or later. But the, one thing it
does avoid is the interdiction
product destruction
part of this puzzle, which again is a
minor
effect on the overall footprint, but it's not
a trivial one.
We'll come back to that, during the third
set. I want to finish off this second
set with,
a,
a a short discussion on,
fertilizers.
Specifically,
on shaping fire,
we are always teaching,
wild crafting,
regenerative agriculture,
making your own compost,
you know, using,
local inputs,
you know, things like that. And and, you
know, of course, we're we're we're encouraging people.
We're trying to coax them away,
from,
synthetics and a plus b fertilizers and petroleum
derivatives and and, you know, this kind of,
synthetification
of of cannabis
fertilizers.
And,
and and and certainly, there is some,
energy usage
with, regenerative as well. You know, it's still
getting packaged some way. It's still being shipped
in most cases. Not everybody's wild crafting. So
so some of that is same between the
both, but but but, you know, I I
have an assumption
that most of this,
regenerative,
soil amendments, because they are often in the
form that they were in nature, you know,
may maybe we need to crush the crab
shell, but but it it but it is
not like,
you know, building an a plus b fertilizer
profile that's just gonna, like, supercharge the plant.
And so I'm I'm wondering how did how
did those compare, the the the the growing
inputs specifically
that are related to nutrition.
Yeah. Important point, and I would refer your,
your listeners to the the widely,
talked about article by Haley Summers and her
colleagues from Colorado a couple years ago. And
and that was the first real serious so
called life cycle assessment of cannabis where they
went through, you know, ammonium nitrate and triple
super phosphate and potassium chloride and other soil
amendments. And also, you know,
neem oil and fungicides and other things. So
they did all that math, and, I baked
that into the work I'm doing. And so
for the way that comes out oh, and
by the way, let's talk about carbon dioxide,
which is actually the largest single
part of the non cultivation energy carbon footprint.
So that's another input.
And do you have that carbon dioxide is
made industrially. And I don't wanna hear about,
like, citing
grows next to breweries. Yeah. Okay. You know,
do that here and there. It's fine. Do
it if you can, but we're just we're
not gonna have Anheuser Busch,
you know, putting cannabis grows next to all
its Sure.
Crappy beer factories.
So so the I've got my spreadsheet,
spun up while you were asking me this
question. So the in this study,
the
carbon footprint from all these inputs that I
just rattled off, also there's the mineral wool,
right, which is what melted freaking rock.
So
so there's a lot of carbon and because
there's a lot of energy in spinning mineral
wool into these cubes that are used once
and are generally not recyclable and go straight
to landfill.
That's actually the second largest
Well, no. Sorry. There's there's other ones that
are other soil amendments are more important. But
at any rate, the,
so if you look at the inputs
as a as a percentage, as a ratio
to the energy carbon
for cultivation. The inputs add are about a
third more.
So it it's significant. If you look at
the whole ball of wax, all the transportation,
everything, about 20%
of all the national emissions
from cannabis are from the the inputs. That's
actually also averaging together indoor and outdoor and
and all of it. So certain sub slices
might be, might be more or less. So
it does matter, but bottom line, it certainly
matters. And the,
you know, and again, you're also sending stuff
to landfill
instead of composting. So there's other reasons that
you know better than I do of why
closing these loops can can really help. You
just wanna be sure not to make methane
in your compost pile because then you're really
shooting yourself in the foot if it goes
anaerobic because it methane's an extremely
potent,
greenhouse gas.
But like I said, the biggest problem is
c o two,
and, you know, it's it's the biggest single
additional carbon footprint,
you know, element beyond the the energy
itself.
The creation of these,
petroleum based fertilizers, I must admit, I don't
exactly know how they are,
made because they've just never been attracted to
me or attractive to me.
How does that
fertilizer creation process
compare
with, you know, the regenerative
way of just collecting
natural items to mix into our soil?
Yeah. That's above my pay grade. I don't
you know, it's not my my specialty. Uh-huh.
But it's it there's a lot of literature
out there on it and, you know, and
there's a lot of fossil fuel. And, you
know, the the making of nitrate, you know,
in particular is of is known to be,
you know, very energy intensive,
process. I bet you that there is a
rich area for study down that rabbit hole
too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So okay. So let's
go ahead and take our, second commercial break.
When we come back in set three,
I wanna talk more about some of the
perspectives,
that are needed and and some of them
that you mentioned during the first set, which
I found to be very valuable. So so,
you are listening to Shaping Fire, and my
guest today is, energy and environmental systems analyst
Evan Mills. And, you know, without these advertisers,
Shaping Fire would not happen. So please support
them and let them know you heard them
on Shaping Fire.
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Sometimes the topics I wanna share with you
are far too brief for an entire Shaping
Fire episode. In those instances, I post them
to Instagram.
I invite you to follow my two Instagram
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The Shaping Fire Instagram has follow-up posts to
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growing and processing best practices, product trials, and
of course, gorgeous flower photos. The Shango Loast
Instagram follows my travels on cannabis garden tours,
my successes and failures in my own garden,
insights and best practices from personal grows everywhere,
and always gorgeous flower photos.
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shaping fire and at shango lows and join
our online community on Instagram.
Welcome back. You are listening to Shaping Fire.
I am your host, Shango Los. And my
guest today is energy and environmental systems analyst,
Evan Mills.
So Evan, you know, I have had to
hold myself,
as
host
several times during the show because I have
gone my whole life defending cannabis from from
people who wanted to tell me it was
a a drug with no medical use, and
and people who said I shouldn't be around
it because of the law, and then people
who are telling me that we shouldn't grow
it because I don't have a license. And
then, you know, it's it's it's it's one
thing after another where I have been been
trying and and all of those with me.
Right? All of all of my cannabis family,
we're we've all
so used to defending cannabis and defending ourselves
and defending our rights and and trying to
get people to understand
that this herb is healing of the mind,
soul, and body.
And and so,
you know, talking about cannabis in the way
that we have today,
I'm also
cannabis. And and and I think that part
of
the
big
shift that has to happen
is
is messaging to come through for people to
understand that we can still
love cannabis,
swear by it, defend it, and also be
responsible
for the energy usage that our,
you know, favorite plant is using
and and, you know, unfortunately, the poor way
that it's being implemented bureaucratically. But I think
at the core of it, somehow
those of us who love it need to
split
from identifying
the cannabis as ourselves
and instead
understand that it it's time for us to
work,
with the plant in a way so that
we're not abusing the environment to get the
part of it that we like.
You just answered your own question beautifully. What's
the next question? No.
Give it your own context, please.
I mean, you you set that up
really well and rationally. And,
look, you know, I grew up, I was
born in 1960.
I grew up in the fabled Laurel Canyon.
I used to go as to Cheech and
Chong's kids, Halloween parties.
I live in Northern California now in the
Redwoods.
I'm a a organic gardener,
not of cannabis, but of, you know, I
love my garden.
I not against the plant or against,
you know, people who who wanna use it.
It's, you know, Jerry, the,
Henry Ford, one of his, you know, many
famous quotes was, everything can always be done
better than it is.
Be done better than it's done now. And
that's Yeah. Part of what leads to innovation.
And
there's, you know, this guy and, you know,
you're earlier, you were asking how LED lights
can be done better, and that that is
a valid thing, and it is something that's
being chased. So I think just having the
attitude of,
let's be creative. Let's be smarter. Let's be
sure we're current.
Let's be not let our protectiveness
you know, I I was listening to another
podcast, and the guy,
was in the industry, and he was opposing
interstate transport,
because he wanted to protect his local market.
And, you know, it's a free country, at
least for the moment. Just you have to
be care you know, think big. You know?
Think about the big picture.
Do we really wanna oppose interstate commerce to
protect
with, you know, without any kind of counterweight
to it? Because that's that's potentially gonna have
an energy, you know,
climate con consequences. Is it worth it?
So I don't know if that's helpful, but,
you know, those are some, I think, some
thoughts. I the industry is also,
to be honest,
starting to do some of this on its
own.
You look at like, it's been some years
now. You know, canopy growth in Canada closed
gigantic
indoor warehouses and transitioned,
you know, to greenhouse. And, you know, there's
more and more greenhouse coming. I mean, that's
been one of the big changes since the
02/2012 study. Obviously, at that point, there was,
you know, very little of these, you know,
prodigious, you know, 300,000
square foot, you know, greenhouses happening. Now there
are no panacea, and it's too bad that
they have the word green in their name
because they use a lot of dehumidification.
Most of them use a lot of electric
lighting,
and still the artificial the, fossil based inputs
and and all of that, but there is
less energy.
And there's and that there's a lot of
optimization potential there
for
sure in the greenhouse type, you know, daylight.
I mean, we're using daylight in our buildings.
You know, there's a whole science around daylighting
for humans
and to use making more use of that.
And the potential,
for that pales compared to, you know, the
cannabis potential. So getting smarter with greenhouses,
I think, is a big one. They they
lose so much energy, and they're almost always
heated with natural gas.
You know, that's that's more the convention.
And, why do you have all this glass
facing north? And on and on. You know,
so there are people out there who are,
you know, have been working not just in
the cannabis space, but in indoor ag more
generally to try to optimize
greenhouses. But, you know, the cost of I
I guess one thing I would add is
that there's an enlightened
self preservation
argument here too
because,
you know, I mean, it can't
here in Northern California, the out the growers
used to call our local electric
monthly energy bills. And,
it's become a huge issue with profitability.
And I would argue, it's some paper I
haven't written yet, but I think the bankruptcies
that we're seeing in the cannabis space
are often tracing back,
not necessarily solely, but in significant part to
the energy spend. You know, you spend a
lot of money upfront
for all the capital. I mean, these lighting
systems, these HVAC systems,
and then if you wanna try to be
green and putting in solar on top of
that and water recovery
from your waste air stream,
so it's and then you operate and you're
spending millions of dollars a month, can be,
on energy. So it's a real pain point.
So, you know, in part, industry is discovering
this kind of the hard way, but I
would I would hate to see a big
boom and bust where we have all these,
you know, abandoned warehouses with all this equipment
that nobody else needs in them. And,
so The boom and bust, I think, is,
on on the menu for,
California because it's already happening. Right? I I
hope that we see this better in other
states. And,
earlier in in in this last
run of words,
you had mentioned that,
you know, some of the things that,
the industry is doing to improve, and it's
really
startling how low the bar is for a
lot of the folks to make an impression.
For example,
you know, I was down in California as
I often am, and, you know, I picked
up some, regenerative,
cannabis flower from Soul Spirit Garden. And I
was just I was overjoyed
and and made an Instagram post because they
use,
compostable
dupe tubes and and,
some kind of
compostable paper ink,
you know, for their for their boxes. And
I was just floored to see something that
existing because, you know, I I go into
places all across the country, and I've I've
not
seen anybody do that that actively. And and
here I am overjoyed and and, you know,
all all love and support to soul spirit,
but but we we need to see that
from just one farm. Right? We need to
see that with in in entire states,
moving in this generation
or in this general direction.
I was also curious earlier,
during second set, you you talked about some
inherent market bias
towards indoor that wasn't coming from the consumer.
And, and I wanted to hit on that
before we wrapped up. So would you would
you kind of color that in for us?
Because I'd like to hear those points. Sure.
It's yeah. It's pretty
interesting and disheartening to dig in a bit
to, like, how the market's working in the
regulatory sphere and and other aspects.
One is that that we see here in
California, and it's probably true in other states,
I know it's true in other states
varying by state,
is that some of the legislation
defers to well, first of all, some of
the legislation, like for a while, Illinois
was only allowing indoor cultivation.
Full stop. In California,
the legalization rec the recreational stage,
left it to it was it was legalized
statewide, but it left it to the jurisdictions,
meaning counties and cities,
to
to color in,
you know, what the policies were gonna be,
and half of California by land area
forbids outdoor cultivation.
So they can't make it illegal because the
state
allows it to be legal, but they can
force it to only be indoors. And
one can have a conversation about why in
the world that is. At the municipality
level. Yeah. It could be city or county.
So that's that's a a distortion.
And then you have,
this whole world of financial incentives,
and
I'm the first person to defend and argue
for financial incentives for energy efficiency and and
renewables.
We typically think of them as utility rebates
for better LED lighting in this industry, but
there can be Rebates for rebates for sun
grown.
And exactly. So you put your finger on
it. That's what's not happening. And so instead,
you see I mean, you Google around. You'll
see growers being handed these large, you know,
table sized
cardboard checks for a million dollars
for putting in LED lights.
Okay. Maybe.
But what you're doing is you're subsidizing
them
to a large degree. I mean, these are
giant rebates, and you're making their product even
more competitive
to
to, out outdoor grown, to some ground. Feed
feeding the wrong solution. Yeah. And so imagine
if indoor
sorry. If if outdoor producers were sorry. If
current indoor producers were given an incentive like
that to not get,
10% energy savings,
but to get 99%
energy savings by shifting to outdoor cultivation, and
maybe that million dollar check should go to
them. And at least level that playing field.
You know, have no subsidies if you don't
like subsidies
or,
you know,
make it make it fair and reward all
the good behavior and not just one. So
there's that. And then I think lastly, you
know, there's this issue of cities
and the trend towards urban cultivation.
And, you know, you don't I mean, you
may notice because you're in the industry, but
the average person driving around in a neighborhood
with warehouses doesn't realize that there's, you know,
a Walmart sized warehouse
that they're driving by that's all cannabis.
And
they're there, you know,
for sometimes the wrong reasons. They're being given,
you know, sweetheart deals on their taxes
or, you know,
lower fees, whatever. And the cities want them
there because the cities are getting
local taxes and local permit fees. So it's
a conflict of interest, and I don't pretend
to know how often, you know, that's swaying
things. But the cities have a conflict of
interest
in
wanting the cannabis facilities there, which kind of
by definition have to be indoors if they're
in the urban fabric in this world, you
know, in this country.
And,
and then but they're blowing up their carbon
footprint
at the same time by by drawing these
entities because there are, like, there are outdoor
growers from California who've moved to Oakland. You
know? And then sometimes these growers,
you know, get on a JAG and they
blow out the p the utility
transformers and they bring in diesel generators to
run, you know, their grows in these low
income
environmentally overburdened areas. And I'm getting off track
from your question, but it it's a the
urban
urbanization of cultivation
Denver's got 200
factory scale
grows in the, you know, in the core
of Denver. Oakland has about 200 in their
so called green zone.
So, I think that's an issue, and,
I think we can do better, you know,
in that that the regulators have a role
to play in,
leveling the playing field and and not throwing
obstacles in front of in front of industry
doing the right
thing. You mentioned that,
you mentioned interstate commerce earlier.
And, you know, we've all been joking since
the since the metal early medical days
that, it's kinda California versus everybody. Right? Like,
as like like, if if you want to
have a cannabis company in your state, you
need to get up, you need to get
efficient, and you need to lock in your
customer base before
interstate,
sales is allowed because as because
California's gonna eat everybody's lunch.
And, you know, and there there's there's a
lot to be said for that. And and
then there there's a lot of challenges to
be said for that too. But but you've
looked at the numbers, and and and what
do you see in your crystal ball as
far as the impact of interstate commerce
on the, you know, overall energy consumption,
for the cannabis industry?
I haven't been able to put numbers on
that at this point. There's just not enough
data, but there's a long discussion in the
paper about how to think about it and
all the kind of
unexpected countervailing factors there and, you know, how
much we would save or how much we
wouldn't save.
You know, there's a lot of as you
mentioned, California is the big gorilla, and you
think of all the,
all the cannabis already. I mean, I think
California produces like three times as much cannabis
as Californians consume, something like that. So all
that's going to other states. California is one
of the cleaner states because we have a
clean grid. And so if you do the
thought experiment and say, well, now we have
interstate commerce and we're gonna save all this
carbon
by having more local production,
you have to subtract
that you may just be bringing in the
same cannabis that's just now on the legal
side. So it's pretty tricky. This is pretty
tricky. But I do that said, I think,
you know, the the there's so much of
The US that's suitable for,
low carbon outdoor cultivation
and, you know, interstate commerce is an obstacle
to that and being able to flow,
everywhere.
And I just you know, I can't put
numbers on it for you, but it's a
big one. We did look at
legalization
more broadly kind of adjacent to the question
you're asking,
how much carbon might that save in its
own right? And it's rather small. You know?
It's difficult to model, difficult to think through.
But, basically, the big benefit of legalization
is less the landfill
and or or I'm sorry. There's more landfill.
That's an offsetting effect. Right? Because mandated landfill
happens in the legal market, not in the
other one. So there's, there's some ways in
which it can increase emissions while the packaging
is one that you mentioned before. You know,
there's, one new paper says there's more packaging
in regulated markets than in the illicit market
and in pre,
preregulated
markets.
But also on the upside,
you have,
from legalization, you have you you're taking the
interdiction
out of it. And so all that cannabis
that's destroyed
and all that embodied energy and carbon is
in principle, you know, in in a rarefied
case, not happening anymore. So that's so it's
something like an 8%
reduction in national carbon footprint from legalization in
its own right. But
that said, legalization
is kind of a necessary but not sufficient
milepost on the route to all kinds of
other policies. Right? You can't incentivize better practices
in an illicit
market. And today,
right now, about the carbon about little more
than half of the national carbon footprint is
in the illicit market and a little less
than half is in the legal market, by
the way. So there's a lot there's a
lot to address still. Yeah. There is a
lot to address. On the other side, but
it's interesting how that comes out. It's not
necessarily obvious that it would break down like
that. Much more of the production is in
the illicit market, but also the illicit market
has a much larger share of outdoor than
the legal market does. So that's part of
why,
even though, you know, 75, 80 percent of
the production is in the illicit side nationally,
the,
the carbon footprints are more more fifty fifty
ish because there's more outdoor in the illicit
side.
So to to wrap us up here,
we have given folks a whole lot of
data points and perspectives, and so many of
them,
you know, they they they're lubricated, and they've
got pivot points, and they depend on the
so so it can be it's very much
a, you know, a complex web, and and
as you address this, then the other part
moves. And so let's let's let's distill this
down
to,
some, I don't know, marching orders or or
a loving suggestion It's probably a little less
authoritarian.
So for for the two key groups who
who we're talking to now. Right? Because, obviously,
we'd have a lot to say for the
politicians, but they're probably not still listening to
the episode.
The people who are listening
are cannabis consumers
and,
and, the cannabis business owners, the cultivators.
And so,
let's take the business first, and then we'll
talk about then then we'll talk to the
consumers. So so, you know,
if if if if a indoor cultivator and
they've got their heart in the right place,
and they have just heard our conversation, and
they're like, damn.
I think that at the very least, I
need to start doing stuff
to decrease my energy consumption.
It'll be better for the company, and it'll
be better for the environment. And I I
wanna help there be a planet for my
kids. Okay? So they're they're they're heading their
hearts in the right place, but they already
have an indoor,
they already have an indoor cultivation.
And so
what would you give to them as the
first
steps on a path that are attainable?
Yeah. Good good questions. And and I have
to say,
you know, I've had a lot of emails
and things from producers over the years, and,
more than a handful have said they've changed
their business model. You know, they've looked at
this and
over time, they've shifted their their industry towards,
you know, greenhouse and then outdoors. So in
a strategic longer term term way, there's no
shame in that, and it's something that's done
all the time. And you can look at
the large industries, and they're definitely shifting
their,
you know,
their center of gravity from from
indoor towards outdoor. So there's that. The longer
term, I think,
nearer term, you know, look at
get the energy audits, you know, really look
at your processes,
think about
I don't wanna say greedy, but, like, maximizing
yield,
you know, is it everything? Run numbers more
carefully because maximum yield isn't necessarily maximum profitability,
you know. Like, things are you know, it's
expensive
to push, you know, a crop, and I'm
not pretending I know more than these cultivators
who've spent their, you know, their professional lives,
you know, dialing this in. But but be
sure you've got good info, good advice.
Think twice at it. Think twice about, you
know, your your current practices. Think about Henry
Ford and how you can do better.
So I think that's as
a as a near term about as good
as we can get. And,
And then so how about the consumer then?
Because, you know, the consumer, it's interesting because
the consumer is both the most powerful and
the least powerful.
Right. They're they're at the end of the
long chain, so it's really hard to influence
any of it. But because it's all being
made for us, it actually does empower us.
But I definitely don't think that, consumers are
using their power at all. So so what
would you say to us as consumers
about some kind of action we can take
to to to to move the the the
percentages in the right direction?
Yeah. I think the consumer is
doesn't realize their power in as in so
many cases. Right? Energy, climate more broadly, and
and all kinds of other issues. So I
think
talk to your budtender,
ask questions, be curious,
ask for,
you know, ask for data on your prod
on the different products,
make it known that it it matters to
you. And,
you know, consumers can change their behavior and
that changes the market, and there are consumers,
it sounds like like yourself, you know, who
who,
prefer Sungrown and,
hunt for the product that's just right for
them. Or,
I mean, I don't think it's even necessary,
but come down and auction quality, whatever. It's
just or make quality part of your definition
of sorry. Make environment part of your definition
of quality. Right? It's that doesn't seem like
a stretch. Like, what is quality? What is
quality of life? Isn't part of quality of
life being, you know, not having our our
homes burned in wildfire seriously, you know. So
so I think the consumers, you know, being
aware and educating themselves in is hard. Right?
Because there's very little information out there for
them and and it's not being provided by
industry. I think also being aware of greenwashing,
you know, there's a lot of greenwashing,
unfortunately. I have a page on my site
that your listeners are welcome to look at
with examples of the greenwashing that happens. And
it shouldn't be on the consumer to root
that out and,
clean that up. But, unfortunately,
there aren't really regulators, you know, going after
this, but that that's a a problem for
consumers is,
even like the notion of terroir, you know,
like so we've got cannabis grown in a
windowless factory,
not in soil with no sun, no rain
in
California,
in in,
Arcadia, you know, and it's called Humboldt. You
know, like, what is what is that? So,
maybe there's something there that I'm not understanding,
you know. I guess the water,
but the water has been so heavily treated
by the time it gets there. So I
think that's something for consumers. And, you know,
and back to the producers for a second,
I think another thing they can do is,
I mean, it's under this banner of being
curious and inquisitive and also forthcoming. You know,
share data,
work with researchers,
you know,
benchmark your carbon footprint against your competitors and
see, like, well, how am I doing? Because
benchmarking is a really powerful
tool to see, well, what what are other
people? What are the best practices out there?
And, you know, go for those. There is
a lot of documentation on best practices within
indoor, within greenhouse. So I think that's something
to do. And consider
product labeling, especially if you're doing better, you
know, then get the word out there and
work with the dispensaries and work with these
the value chain
to get transparency for consumers. And if consumers
are asking for it and producers are pushing
it,
then consumers will start to be more informed
about, you know, about carbon footprint. So that's
something that everyone, you know, all the actors,
from the regulators to the growers to the
consumers,
could do more in because it's pitiful. You
know, there's just there's such an information vacuum
facing, everybody,
you know, all from soup to nuts there.
Right on.
Well, thank you, Evan. You know,
we easily could have done a couple more
hours on this topic, but we you know,
the goal was not to inundate people too
much, but but to really
illustrate to folks,
you know, how how
tenacious
energy consumption
is all through,
the chain and to start having us think
about it whether our our end goal is
to actually
electrical usage in our present operation as step
one,
I think that is, you know, it's an
honorable pursuit. And, and even though we don't
wanna look at anything that is, you know,
chastising of cannabis, well, I I think it's
I think it's damn time. So thank you
so much for giving up your personal time
to join us today on shaping fire and
to to share your, like,
wildly in-depth
understanding of the data behind our industry.
Your your your stories, your insight, and definitely
your good share are definitely appreciated.
My pleasure. Thanks for your great questions.
Excellent.
So dear listener, if you would like to
follow-up,
and learn even more from from Evan Mills,
the best way to do that is to
go to his website, which is is kinda
like a, it's kinda like a repository of
of his research, and the the graphics there
are just
absolutely educational and, illustrative and fantastic. So so
even if you're not even if you wanna
know more, but you're not in the mood
to read a whole bunch, by goodness gracious,
go to his website and look at the
graphs. You'll learn so much so fast. So,
the website for that is evan, e v
a n, dash
mills, m I l l s, dot com.
Evan mills dot com. And also,
if you are driving or something, you can,
definitely go
to the shaping fire website for this episode,
number one twenty, and,
and you can grab the link there. You
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