HEMP SHOULD BE HIGH ON THE FUEL AGENDA

Re: The needle and the damage done

The cure to our oil addiction is industrial hemp, but no one wants to
talk about it because it looks like marijuana. In fact, everything
that we make with crude oil can be made better, cheaper and cleaner
with hemp. Hemp doesn't require chemical fertilizers and pesticides
to grow tall and strong; it grows in even marginal soil. And while it
provides food from the top of the plant, it provides fibre and fuel
from the stalk.

One acre of hemp can produce up to 1,000 gallons of methanol in four
months. In the southern U.S., that could mean 3,000 gallons per acre
per year. If the U.S. would sow just 10 per cent of its farmland with
industrial hemp instead of corn, enough methanol fuel could be
produced to almost completely end the use of gasoline.

But the oil barons don't want anyone to know that. Small
ethanol-producing plants in every small community on the planet would
have to loosen their stranglehold on all of us, so it looks like we
are stuck with crude oil, and the wildly cost-prohibitive
alternatives, for at least another generation.

Russell Barth, Ottawa