The Cheapest Way to Save the Planet Grows Like a Weed | Hacker News Reader

The Cheapest Way to Save the Planet Grows Like a Weed

truthout.org

69 pointschmaynard23 comments

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.

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.

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

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

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').

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.

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?

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)

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

It's not immediately clear to me that the energy involved in creating a "more controlled environment" would make the investment a net positive.

In a contained setting it still will sequester carbon. It is more easily monitored for expected behavior. It minimizes risk to other ecosystems.

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.

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

Just put them in a big pile/hole somewhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I found their call for donations at the bottom troubling:

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

EDIT: formatting

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