Sonoma County and growers often claim there are no problems at permitted grows—that illegal activity only happens at black market grows. Not true. A grower near Knights Valley, Nicolas Bettencourt, has filed the attached law suit against Sonoma County. He asks the court to strike down Sec. 26-88-254(f)(21) of the cannabis ordinance that includes the…
Read more
Dear environmentalists: Cannabis is not a good story in terms of carbon footprint, resources… Federal laws bar cannabis from crossing state lines, driving up the cost — and the emissions — of an industry using indoor grow operations Marijuana has never been more popular in the U.S. — and its carbon emissions have never posed…
Read more
Report calls out ‘inconvenient truth’ about marijuana and carbon emissions Smart Approaches to Marijuana CEO Dr. Kevin Sabet told “Fox & Friends” on Friday that the cannabis industry is being a “huge problem” for the environment when it comes to water and electricity usage. Sabet reacted to a Politico report calling out the “inconvenient truth” about carbon emissions from the cannabis…
Read more
Months ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom, target of a disgruntled developer and facing a recall campaign while managing extraordinary wildfire storms, COVID-19 and worsening drought, called for a voluntary water conservation effort that initially targeted only Sonoma and Mendocino counties. Not too much later, as the greatest reservoirs in the state came closer to reaching their…
Read more
A new study has found that cannabis farms in California’s prime growing regions, including the North Coast, rely primarily on groundwater wells to irrigate their crop as opposed to streams, providing more insight into the debate over water scarcity as the state grapples with a historic drought. The Cannabis Research Center at UC Berkeley report…
Read more
Illegal pot invades California’s deserts, bringing violence, fear, ecological destruction By JACLYN COSGROVE, LOUIS SAHAGÚN | LOS ANGELES TIMES EXCLUSIVE JULY 11, 2021 5 AM PT Before his corpse was dumped in a shallow grave 50 miles north of Los Angeles, Mauricio Ismael Gonzalez-Ramirez was held prisoner at one of the hundreds of black-market pot farms that…
Read more
Chinese dreams on Native American land: A tale of cannabis boom and bust “All we see is plastic. We see trash. We see dead marijuana plants,” says Bea Redfeather. “That’s what they left us with.” In the pandemic, hundreds of Chinese migrants who lost their jobs moved to a remote city on the Navajo Nation…
Read more
Promoters of marijuana cultivation such as Cannacraft and SPARC assert this should become a “marquee industry” in Sonoma County that will generate wealth and create new jobs, yet somehow not exacerbate the housing shortages. This argument merits close examination. Land and labor are expensive in Sonoma County compared to many locations where marijuana can be…
Read more
The burgeoning marijuana industry gobbles up electricity High Country NewsJonathan Thompson May 31, 2021 From the print edition Location, location, location: That’s the deciding factor when it comes to the size of marijuana cultivation’s carbon footprint, according to a new study out of Colorado State University. The paper’s authors, led by Hailey Summers, confirmed previous findings that…
Read more
To The Board of Supervisors, Do you know what it’s like to live near a cannabis farm? Unfortunately for us, my family and our neighbors do. There is a medium-size operation with approximately 80 in-ground plants (less than an acre). The smell coming from this operation was overwhelming and constant. We live down-wind from that…
Read more
Recent Comments