https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/karmakoalapodcast/episodes/2025-02-15T23_46_19-08_00
A couple of weeks back I noticed a post on Linked In where Evan mentioned he’d just published a report that he’d worked on as private paper without funding.
“Energy-intensive indoor cultivation drives the cannabis industry’s expanding carbon footprint”
I was immediately more than intrigued and after noticing the flippancy of the very few comments on Linked In about his work and the almost complete lack of interest in what he had published, made me all the more determined to find out more about the author and his work.
You can see the report here.
Evan is a native Californian with an energy knowledge CV that would knock the socks off most allcomers
I set up a call with Evan to talk about his report and it soon became obvious that this wasn’t going to be a simple 30 minutes chat but likely 4 podcasts to cover an issue that has been buried by everybody across the board.
Not just the cannabis industry itself, but investors, legislators, cannabis regulators, environmental regulators state and federal and a host of others.
And as Evan points out he’s not just talking about the industrialized greenhouse & vertical regulated industry but also the illegal cannabis cultivation industry in North America that some believe to be 3/4’s of current production.
Evan has also published the following papers on cannabis energy consumption.
See the researchgate link below to read his papers
June 2020 Energy Use by the Indoor Cannabis Industry: Inconvenient Truths for Producers, Consumers, and Policymakers
May 2021 Comment on “Cannabis and the Environment: What Science Tells Us and What We Still Need to Know”
July 2022 Cannabis ESG Risk is a Buzzkill for Investors
July 2022 The Incompatibility of Cannabis Factory Farming with the Principles of ESG Risk Management and Impact Investment
December 2022 Contrary to Conventional Methods, Best Practices for Cannabis Cultivation Result in Less Intensive Land and Water Use for Outdoor than for Indoor Farming
Evan Mills
Evan Mills is an Affiliate and recently retired Senior Scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), operated by the University of California–one of the world’s leading research centers on energy and environment. He was past leader of LBNL’s Center for Building Science, which represented the work of about 400 people.
Mills is a member of the international body of scientists under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC collectively shared in the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 with former U.S. Vice President Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.
While completing his Bachelors of Science degree in Conservation and Resource Studies at U.C. Berkeley in the mid-1980s, he studied and taught about green buildings with Sim van der Ryn. He received a Masters of Science degree in 1987 from U.C. Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group (where he is now a Research Affiliate) and a Ph.D. from the Department of Environmental and Energy Systems Studies under Thomas B. Johansson at Lund University in Sweden in 1991. In Sweden, he worked closely with the Swedish State Power Board (Vattenfall) and the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development on national energy planning projects, while serving as an energy advisor to the Swedish Parliamentary Working Group on Energy Futures.
He spent most of his career at LBNL. His closest mentor and collaborator there was Art Rosenfeld, for whom he served as his Deputy Director of the Center for Building Science, later leading the Center. He also consults widely for private industry and the public sector.
His research centers on the impacts of climate change mitigating those impacts through reduced emissions and loss prevention. His specialties are energy efficiency in buildings and industry and the intersection of energy technology, global climate, and risk management. His interests further center around pinpointing “sleeper” uses of energy and empowering policymakers, consumers, and non-traditional market actors to capture improved efficiencies, reduced greenhouse-gas emissions, resilience, and other non-energy benefits.
Research communication to stakeholder groups is a key focus. Mills has published nearly 400 technical articles and reports and has contributed to 13 books and many articles in the popular press. He has been a speaker in 20 countries and 57 cities.
For more information see http://evanmills.lbl.gov
Also read Evan’s paper
The Incompatibility of Cannabis Factory Farmingwith the Principles of ESG Risk Management and Impact Investment
The-Incompatibility-of-Cannabis-Factory-Farming-with-the-Principles-of-ESG-Investing
Evan at Researchgate
