Global Warming and Marijuana Legalization
Indoor Growing Electricity Consumption – Marijuana eradication efforts have also pushed many growers indoors, where they run up massive electric bills on lighting, fans and air filters. A single standard grow house is estimated to consume 20 times as much as an average household. In California alone, electricity used for marijuana cultivation is estimated at 3% of the state’s total.
Opposition to Electricity Record-keeping – Illegal indoor marijuana growers have blocked California's efforts to disclose information about household electricity use. Since law enforcement routinely uses electricity consumption to find indoor marijuana grow sites, growers vigorously oppose California's efforts to increase the transparency of electricity use at the household level. Researchers have determined that while the majority of the public supports increased transparency, growers have blocked these efforts.
Global Warming and the War on Drugs
In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, for his work in alerting the world to the imminent threat of global climate change and his motion picture, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore argues that the people of the world have a moral duty to stop this climate change. The thrust of his analysis is the introduction of "greenhouse" gases through the use of hydrocarbon fuels is leading to an increase in the average temperature of the planet. This is most dramatically observed in the melting of glaciers and polar ice.
News about the climate change, as well as the human impact on it, is now posted in many major media websites, and has now been accepted by over 97% of all climate scientists, according to NASA.
But even if we heed Gore's advice and reduce our carbon emissions, we will not solve the problem in itself. In October 2007, the United Kingdom's Prince Charles addressed the World Wildlife Federation and noted that rainforests, such as that of the Amazon, are the natural "thermostats" that "regulate our climate...to a degree that is all but impossible to imagine."
On October 29, 2007, Prof. James Lovelock told the Royal Society that even stopping the growth in the emission of greenhouse gases will be inadequate to stop global climate change because the computer models of climate change focus on greenhouse gases to the exclusion of deforestation and other factors.
But destruction of the Amazon rainforest continues. Between 2000 and 2010, deforestation claimed an area the size of the United Kingdom. Experts at the Nature Conservancy of Brazil attribute a large part of the Amazon deforestation to soybean cultivation.
However, the U.S. Department of State attributed 25 percent of all Amazon deforestation in the 20th Century to coca cultivation - some 2.3 million hectares, according to Rand Beers, then Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. National Geographic shows a similar trend in recent years.
https://www.cjpf.org/global-warming
