"It's worse than we thought." Sound familiar?

[AverageJoe90]

73. Okay, here's one scenario.

I think that this scenario is unavoidable, that people have the right to be psychologically prepared for it, and that people like Light and McPherson and I have not only the right but a responsibility to talk about it.

I wouldn't quite disagree, except for McPherson's woefully idiotic "16*C by 2100" gaffes and Malcolm P.R. Light's "Life will be extinct by mid-century" B.S.. There's legitimately preparing people for the worst, and then there's downright fearmongering; Light and McPherson, have been doing the latter, even if not intentionally.

Hemp is great for smoking, but it suffers from massive problems of scale when compared to the 12 million tonnes of oil, 21 million tonnes of coal and 8 million tonnes of natural gas we consume each and every day. We consume 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels per year. Hemp yields 4 tonnes of biomass and between 15 and 100 gallons (0.3 to 2.5 bbl) of oil per acre . Do the math.

According to my calculations, to plant enough hemp to serve the world's oil consumption:

Let's assume, for our purposes, that every acre of hemp produces 1.75 bbl of oil(definitely a little on the low side, IMHO) per acre. 31 bil. gallons of oil consumed by the world, every year(roughly about equal to the EIA's estimate for 2010) divided by 1.75 equals about 17.7 bil. in the hemp equivalent. If my calculations are correct, that could require about 27,000,000 sq mi. of land for hemp alone to meet ALL of the world's current oil requirements(though I must admit I'm not a math whiz, so this number could realistically be a little higher....or a lot lower, I dunno which.).

For the U.S. alone, it would require about 10.1 million sq.mi., or about twice the country's total land area. But realistically, if we tried, we could do about 2 million sq. mi. at the very most. There's huge potential for your country too: 3.8 million sq. mi. of land is out there, and let's say we could use about a third of that or about 1.3 million, for hemp. And since Canada consumes far less energy than the U.S. does, only about 2 million barrels per day, or about ~760 million per year(Not bad!), or about 434 million in the hemp equivalent.

In this scenario, if Canada were to be entirely self-sufficient in replacing oil, only about 670,000 sq. mi. would be needed. Let's say that Canada replaces about 80% of fossil fuel usage with hemp, that would equal about 542,000 sq. mi; that would leave, in this scenario, about 750,000 sq. mi. or so to be used, and that about half of this is exported to the U.S., equaling about 2.4 million sq. mi.

So that would only replace about a quarter of the U.S.'s total oil energy. So, obviously we can conclude that hemp alone won't be enough. But it's a decent start.

Even so, these calculations are by no means, perfect, and I'll be refining them over time....perhaps I'll dedicate a topic or two to this in the near future.