Every kilogram of cultivated marijuana leads to about 4.3 tons of carbon dioxide.

Slowly but surely, medicinal use of cannabis is becoming more widely acceptable across the United States and the world, while states like Colorado and Washington are filling to the brim with luscious and towering grow operations.

Booming Alberta company supplies nearly 4,000 customers, and demand is climbing.

Tucked into the rolling hills of Alberta's ranch country, just down the road from the small town of Cremona, lies one of Canada's biggest medical marijuana operations.  

Just over an hour from Calgary, the Aurora Cannabis production facility is set back from the road, and ringed by barbed wire. 

Security is tight, inside and out.

​Inside the sprawling 55,000-square-foot facility, key cards are needed to enter and exit each room, and security cameras perched above doors monitor everything that goes on.

It’ll probably give him a bump in the polls back in Oregon.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a high-profile supporter of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, has been caught on video with $70,000 in drug money. The footage, provided exclusively to The Huffington Post, also captures Rep. Earl Blumenauer, another Oregon Democrat, as well as a prominent local businessman, Tyson Haworth. 

The video, however, was not a sting operation run by the Drug Enforcement Administration or FBI. Instead, it’s an effort to highlight a gaping and dangerous hole in national cannabis policy, if such a thing even exists. 

There is no guarantee California will vote to legalize recreational marijuana in November, but political operative and father of four Daniel Conway has already staked his future on it.

Conway left his job as chief of staff to Sacramento's celebrity mayor, former Phoenix Suns NBA basketball star Kevin Johnson, to help start the marijuana investment company Truth Enterprises.

He is one of hundreds in the most populous U.S. state already pushing ahead with plans to enter a market experts say will be worth $4 billion by 2020.

"I'm someone of an age and of a demographic that sees the legalization and normalization of marijuana as inevitable," said Conway, 35. "This was a chance not just to build companies but to build an industry."

To Keith Crocker, it's clear marijuana could be the logical next step in pushing Juneau's tourism industry to a higher level.

That's why he and business partner Mitchell Knottingham created Juneau Cannabis Tours.

Their idea — to give tours of Alaska's new marijuana industry in action — is a glimpse into a potential new piece of the state's visitor economy.

Some Alaskans are mulling the idea of starting up marijuana tourism companies, while others already have business licenses, but all seem to be biding their time until more commercial marijuana licenses are approved later this year.

Going on marijuana tours in Denver gave Crocker and Knottingham insight into the sort of company they wanted to build in Alaska.

The marijuana industry faces a huge problem: Few banks will touch cannabis cash. 

Even though big bucks are on the line — Colorado is predicted to pull in more than $140 million from taxes on marijuana sales in 2016 alone — marijuana is still classified as a Schedule I drug at a the federal level.

Most banks don't want to deal with that kind of risk, forcing dispensaries to operate on an all-cash basis.

Seasoned leadership from tech giant EMC and Sun Microsystems joins quality control and data analytics company serving legal cannabis industry.

If you asked seasoned tech executives Richard Corley and Doug Wood six months ago if their careers would lead them to the booming legal cannabis industry they would have certainly said, “Not likely!”. 

Enter Orange Photonics founder, Dylan Wilks, an expert in spectroscopy and chromatography. “In order to scale our upcoming cannabis analysis platform, integrate hardware with cloud-based data analytics and expand our potential customer base, we needed individuals with a diverse set of corporate, business and product related skills. The individuals we found have been there and done that, again and again.” 

A few months ago, noted scientist Dr Henry Lowe made another pitch for the use of science and technology to aid sustainable development in Jamaica.

Addressing the 50th anniversary annual general meeting of the Jamaica Exporters’ Association, Dr Lowe pointed out that successful societies, such as Singapore, USA and Germany, have used science and technology, not only for the goods and services they produce, but also to establish quality and standardisation for their domestic and export industries.

David Dinenberg’s Kind Financial developed software that helps government agencies track pot production and sales. The unlikely software entrepreneur, with no tech background, has set up a partnership with Microsoft to market the software.

When David Dinenberg decided to get into the marijuana industry, his business plan was based on fear.

In 2014, he founded Kind Financial with the aim of making loans and providing other services to marijuana growers and sellers — customers banks were scared to work with.

Just two years later, though, the company’s main business is about helping navigate bureaucracy, specifically the red tape that comes with legalization. Its marquee product is software that helps government agencies track pot production and sales.

It's time to start taking marijuana stocks seriously. That's because they're about to offer incredible profit potential thanks to the rapid growth of the legal pot industry.

According to ArcView Market Research, U.S. companies that sell legal marijuana will rake in $6.7 billion in sales by the end of 2016. That's a 25% increase from $5.36 billion last year.