Report: Growing Marijuana Accounts for 1% of all US Electricity

...and growing marijuana is bad for the planet. Take that, hippies!

After medical pot use was made legal in California in 1996, Mills says, per-person residential electricity use in Humboldt County jumped 50 percent compared to other parts of the state.

In order to produce some 17,000 metric tons of marijuana this year, Mills estimates authorized growers will use $5 billion worth of energy. That works out to the output of seven big electric power plants.

Much of the carbon dioxide produced by the industry comes from transportation, though the need for lights “500-times greater than recommended for reading” also uses a lot of power and generates a lot of pollution.