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

[GliderGuider]

79. Replacing the world's oil supply with hemp oil at 1.75 bbl/acre/year

would require about 5 times the total amount of arable land in the world (there are 3.5 billion acres, we'd need almost 18 billion acres.
Or 1.5 times the total amount of agricultural land (there are just over 12 billion acres of such land in the world) .

And that's just for the oil. To replace all the coal we'd need to plant 3/4 of all the world's arable land to hemp. And we still haven't dealt with the natural gas problem.

Using hemp for energy is the same kind of problem as proposals to use sugar cane ethanol and bagasse. It's an interesting idea, but is only useful in regions that have low demand, the right soil and climate conditions, and don't need the land for food production.

Most people have no clue how much fossil fuel the world really uses in a year. Scale is the one factor that most consistently reduces these hypothetical silver bullets to real-world brass BBs.

We are leveraging the fact that fossil fuels have been accumulating for 100+ million years. If we estimate that it will all be used up over 300 years, then we are burning it over 300,000 times faster than it accumulated. Or to look at it another way we are burning up over 1000 years of planetary legacy every single day.

Mitigation through substitution is bullshit.