Hemp produces 4 times as much biomass per acre as the nearest competitor. 1 acre of hemp can produce 1000 gallons of methanol. That is enough to drive 20,000 miles on a 20mpg small SUV or 50,000 miles using a hybrid car. The average household consumes 3.6 gallons of crude oil per day (import and domestic, all uses); this does not count coal but it does include most cars, trucks, buses, trains, portable generators, lawn mowers, fuel oil heaters, petroleum fired power plants. That number appears to include liquid natural gas as well as oil that becomes gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, motor oil, and plastic (yes, hemp can be converted into plastic). It does not include a billion tons/year of coal (which would be equivalent to about 1/3 more crude oil). So, approximately 1.3 acres per household would eliminate the need for petroleum products or 2.6 acres if you rotate with a nitrogen fixing crop which is then plowed under. There are around 100 million households. The US government pays farmers to not grow crops on 90 million acres of farmland. Another 500 million acres of marginal farmland is available. Hemp does not deplete the soil (except for a little nitrogen) and generally improves soil conditions. To avoid fertilizer use and qualify as organic, though, hemp should be rotated with a nitrogen fixing crop. Hemp does not require pesticides or herbicides. And unlike crop land that lies unused, in the event of a food shortage you can eat the hemp seeds. And hemp is fast growing so it can not only be planted after another crop is harvested, it may even increase next years yield of that crop. There is a lot of additional farm land, timber land, or ranch land (cows can eat hemp) that could be used. Not to mention back yards, railroad and utility right of ways, highway medians, etc. Biomass fuels do not contribute to global warming. The carbon dioxide produced by burning biomass comes from plants which in turn get their carbon out of the atmosphere. Hemp is said to grow in all 50 US states. About 40% of our oil use is produced domestically. Surprisingly, less than 15% seems to come from the Persian Gulf. Taken to the extreme, the US has a total land area of 3537438 square miles or 2.27 billion acres which, if you could devote it all to hemp could produce 2.27 trillion gallons of fuel every other year or 1.13 trillion gallons per year; that is about 8.6 times our annual consumption. So, about 12% of land area would be needed to replace petroleum. Since hemp grows at 4 times the rate of trees (assume it is probably 4 times as effective against greenhouse gases), it would presumably be OK from a greenhouse perspective to replace trees with hemp if you didn't burn it. For every 4 acres of trees you replaced with hemp, about 1 acre would presumably need to be set aside to offset the original anti-greenhouse effect of the trees. Of course, in the interest of biodiversity you may not want one species of plant dominating that much of the ecosystem.
One of the cool things about biomass is that you can grow hemp and make it into paper (hemp is 5 times more productive per acre than trees when it comes to paper production), use the paper, and then recycle it into fuel. So timberland used for paper could be used for hemp. Wildlife would have to adapt a bit.
And, of course, there are "negawatts"; Amory Lovins pointed out a while back that if the US replaced all light bulbs with compact fluorescents, we would go from a net energy importing nation to a net energy exporting nation.
Hemp was banned in the US in 1937. Most American's thought that "Marijuana", vilified by the Hearst yellow journalism newspaper empire, was some exotic Mexican plant or the poisonous plant "loco weed", not a form of the incredibly useful hemp plant that had been so important to civilization for the past 10,000 years.
Industrial HEMP does not have psychoactive properties.
Hemp products were largely imported at the time it was outlawed because of high labor costs in processing the fiber but a new machine cut the laber costs by two orders of magnitude.
Hemp was apprently outlawed in large part because it competed with new technologies that themselves have become the source of major problems facing the US today: including globabal warming, water polution, dependence on foreign oil, dependence on foreign goods, deforestation, malnutrition, non-biodegradable products in landfills, the high cost of pharmaceutical drugs, and excesive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
Racism against blacks, mexicans, and chinamen played a very large part in the banning of Marijuna and other drugs. Also, the financial interest of a couple robber barrons played a crucial role.
Visit VOTE HEMP to take action!
This file is maintained by Mark Whitis (whitis@freelabs.com).
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