The plants we define as weeds are usually prolific, hardy and capable of crowding out other species, both native and agricultural. In many cases, these are species originally planted by farmers from all over Europe who came as colonists and immigrants to lands all over the globe, which have spread across and beyond the lands they came to farm.
Succeeding generations of farmers bought seed and plants bred from species brought from all over the world. Quite a few of these went wild, spreading from farms along railway lines, roads, rangelands and waterways carried by birds and livestock. Sometimes there were hitchhikers, weeds in the seed wheat, and the like. These continued to compete with the crop plants whose habitat they shared wherever the seed came from. They all thrived in their new homes, swapping genes with anything closely related and marching on in their quest to turn sunlight and water into biomass, covering everything in their path.
Vast amounts of money, herbicides and human labor are consumed in the attempt to control these weeds for a season or two. The waste biomass creates large amounts of greenhouse gases, and when contaminated by pesticides, a source of ground and water pollution as it rots.
Simply looked at from a different perspective, the hated weeds become one of the biggest "underutilized" resource streams we have. Their prolific hardy natures make them supremely efficient producers of biomass with little to no human input, perfect for biofuels crops. Many of them produce food, fiber and/or phyto-chemicals also useful in the transition to a sustainable agricultural economy. These plants are self-renewing wells of prosperity if we can only learn to stop fighting them and start putting them to work instead.
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