The Cheapest Way to Save the Planet Grows Like a Weed

https://truthout.org/articles/the-cheapest-way-to-save-the-planet-grows-like-a-weed/

by chmaynard • 7 years ago

69 23 7 years ago

Then having grown it, the government may well force you to destroy the plants:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/30/oxfordshire-...

There are some very silly, and inconsistent prejudices around hemp. I'd be amazed to see consistent policy and use even if it can help the climate crisis more than everything else.

blacksmith_tb2• 7 years ago

As much as I like hemp, this seems implausible. Trees sequester carbon for longer (as wood). If I was looking for a quicker alternative I'd plant bamboo (which also 'grows like a weed').

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

Well, you'd just have to find a way to store ("sequester") the plants for a few decades at least after their initial growth spurt, and you have a good carbon solution there.

notfromhere• 7 years ago

Furniture? Wood products? We already do a lot of that.

vkou• 7 years ago

It should also be mentioned that the quickest and cheapest way to sequester carbon is not burning most forms of it in the first place.

skrowl2• 7 years ago

I think most people would agree that "stop burning fossil fuels" is a utopian idea that doesn't actually work in practice. You're not going to get people to give up on it (at least near term) so you need to focus on solution that can actually be achieved.

NikkiA• 7 years ago

I suspect the best way is algae, but we'd likely destroy the oceans overusing it given humanity's inability to do things in a metered and sensible way.

wysifnwyg2• 7 years ago

Why set it lose in the ocean when you could contain it and measure it in a more controlled environment?

blacksmith_tb2• 7 years ago

Algae are interesting, but I don't see them as being ideal for tying up the carbon for long - we'd need to compress it into bricks and bury them, perhaps?

firethief• 7 years ago

Aren't we already growing algae in the ocean about as fast as we can? Is there more we could be doing than manufacturing fertilizer on a geological scale and letting a lot of it end up washing out to sea? (Honest question, I haven't thought about this avenue of geoengineering before)

vonnik• 7 years ago

In the American West at least, trees go up in flames every few years. Turning hemp into products people don't burn might be a better way to sequester carbon.

kilo_bravo_3• 7 years ago

The widespread cultivation of an invasive non-native species of plant to solve an environmental crisis is just another environmental crisis.

Hemp, and cannabis, should be legal.

But this fetishization has to stop.

Billions of people all over the world have never faced a prohibition on the cultivation of hemp. Millions of tons of it are grown every year in China and across the world and there are no restrictions on its importation. Right now you can go on alibaba.com and get an entire shipping container of hemp delivered to your loading dock practically anywhere in the world.

Growing hemp has been legal for decades in much of Europe, forever in China, France, and Russia.

Articles like this only really lead to two possible conclusions:

1. Hemp isn't a wonder substance, or

2. All seven billion four hundred million people on Earth who aren't Americans are so stupid that they can't figure out how to turn hemp into miracle products and only the brave and skilled American men of science are capable enough to tease out its reclusive secrets where Europeans, Indians, Chinese, and others have failed after centuries of trying.

Yeah... I'm going to go with option 1. I've done a lot of traveling and there are smart people all over the world.

Articles like this are just the worst:

"It can be grown on a wide scale on nutrient poor soils with very small amounts of water and no fertilizers."

30 seconds talking to a Canadian or French hemp grower, or 15 seconds on your search engine of choice proves this, with decades of research by university and government agricultural department scientists to back it up (or hell just perusing one back issue of High Times) to be false.

Hemp is a plant like any other, it takes energy from the sun, carbon from the air, and material from the earth and turns them into plant matter.

In soils with poor nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur levels-- nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur must be added.

skrowl2• 7 years ago

Agreed!

"Reforest rural areas with fast-growing plants native to that region" seems like a MUCH safer idea than "YOLO, HEMP ALL THE THINGS!"

We have no idea how regions in the world that don't have hemp would react to suddenly having an abundance it.

jacobush• 7 years ago

Agreed. It's short sighted. In Ireland apparently they PINE ALL THINGS!

( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20380793 )

bovermyer• 7 years ago

Sounds great, but I wouldn't exactly trust this particular source.

Also, keep in mind that something that grows like a weed needs to be controlled carefully, or it will crowd out other (necessary) species of plant.

markvdb• 7 years ago

Just today, a UK farm has had to destroy its entire hemp crop :

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/30/oxfordshire-...

malandrew• 7 years ago

Based on the title, I was expecting this to be able Kudzu.

RenRav• 7 years ago

Same, but secretly I was hoping someone found a way to exploit Azolla.

pc2g4d• 7 years ago

I found their call for donations at the bottom troubling:

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It’s not difficult to see that we all have to do more to stop it before it’s too late.

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1.3 million people read Truthout last month. If every one of you chipped in a few bucks we’d all be swimming in racist tears. Imagine that!

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Nothing ironic at all about hating people for hating people for their race :-|

EDIT: formatting

ggm• 7 years ago

I'd map this to a different expression of the same goal.

If we plant trees for long-term remediation, what other thing can we plant, which achieves short-term remediation in local microclimate, has financial or other upsides, displaces things like woodchip or other plant fibres for commerce, can bootstrap an economy, and is easy to grow in marginal land?

Palm Oil is when it goes wrong: try and displace underground oil with biofuels and you encourage people to cut down rainforest to plant oil palm. But at reduced yield, re-foresting and re-planting lands with trees and hemp feels like a mutually beneficial idea. The trees are the 20+ year work. the Hemp is for smaller but immediate benefits.

The Cheapest Way to Save the Planet Grows Like a Weed

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