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

[AverageJoe90]

81. *Some* of this may be true, but hemp can be grown with food crops, and in fact, is a food crop......

itself.

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.

Technically, you would be correct, I believe, but do keep in mind that I wasn't operating on the assumption that hemp would be the only alternative used for gas.

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.

Again, hemp can pretty much be grown anywhere, including in some places where normal food crops would have a harder time.

Most people have no clue how much fossil fuel the world really uses in a year.

True, but that's something I did take into consideration when doing the calculations for oil.

Scale is the one factor that most consistently reduces these hypothetical silver bullets to real-world brass BBs.

Somewhat true to some extent, but scale is also not quite as big of an obstacle as some may think. My calculations concerning the U.S. didn't take other countries growing it and trade into consideration, and certainly not the usage of other fuel sources.

If you want to talk about proverbial silver bullets, btw, some people seem to think that shrinking the global economy will necessarily solve all of our problems.......what this theory(and that's all it really is, btw!) continually leaves out is the possibility of wars(the world's militaries are majorly contributing to Co2 output, btw!), continued exploitation by certain countries & companies, and many other factors, including the possibility that gas prices might actually drop, which could eventually lead to MORE civilian consumption under certain conditions; Potus actually pointed this out in one of this year's debate speeches that part of the reason gas prices were so low in early '09 was exactly because of the recession(This would not, of course, be inevitable by any means, but it's not impossible either).