I can’t speak for anyone else on this forum, but I’ve known about algae-based fuels for some times. It is an infant technology, but one that holds genuine promise.
But it has nothing to do with hemp, so why are you bringing it up?!
This is foolishness…anything can be grown on land not currently producing anything. Or for better environmental effects you could let the land revert.
This isn’t much of an important point, but just in the interest of correctness… C. sativa and* C. indica* are not industrial vs. drug strains. Both are extremely widely developed for use as drug cultivars and have been for centuries. Indica is more commonly used medically for pain relief, insomnia, etc. whereas sativa strains provide more of a stimulative “mental” effect. Many (some would say the vast majority in the US) drug-use cultivars are hybrids between the two.
It is true that *C. sativa *is the taller, lankier plant, and as such is the variety developed and used for industrial fiber production, but they are industrial strains of C. sativa, a very… very minor subset of cultivars. C. Sativa’s primary use worldwide is most certainly the kind one. 
You’re right to say that there is some taxonomical debate on the topic, but it’s not due to an effort to separate “industrial” plants from “smokable” plants. Taxonomically there is no difference.
Algae looks to actually be what the dreamers want hemp to be, at least as far as fuel goes. Grows in harsh conditions? Algae can be farmed in the desert using seawater, soaks up industrial waste and slaughters the competition on yield by a factor of 15x or better.
But… consider this link (from right before Part 2):
Well, yes. But this is algae, not hemp. It involves no great debate as last I checked algae was perfectly legal and not narcotic in any way I am familiar with.
If you want to talk it up, maybe you should start another thread concerning it.
Dude, you have got to stop falling for the hemp propaganda and conspiracy theories.
Both cannabis sativa and cannabis indica can make fine smoking marijuana. There are different varieties of both and they cause different highs. I believe indica is more popular, largely because the plants are shorter and bushier so they’re easier to grow/harvest.
I suppose non-psychoactive cannabis (hemp) may usually, or even always, be sativa. I don’t know.
Let us assume that Hemp really was the miracle plant, and it’s only silly racist US laws that’s stopping us from cheap fuel, untouched forests and clothes that make the stuff they made Superman’s blanket out of look like tissue paper. :dubious:
Then, why the hell isn’t it grown much in the countries where it’s perfectly legal? You *can *import Hemp products into the USA you know- rope, clothing, even fuel I suppose. But hemp remains a niche market- less than linen for clothes and NOWHERE IS IT GROWN EXTENSIVELY FOR FUEL. Sure, in the USA we have corn subsidies, but in other nations they use cane, not hemp. However- Canada uses corn, not cane (well, it’s too cold to grow cane)ev ien though it’s perfectly legal to grow hemp in the Great White North. Oddly :rolleyes: they only grow modest amounts for clothing and rope. Hemp certainly can grow up there- if it’s the super fuel, you think the Canadians would try it. However no, afaik there’s only a couple small experimental farms, if that.
So, there’s the evidence it’s really no great shakes for ethanol, it’s simply not used for a significant production of ethanol anywhere, even when it’s legal.
Sorry, it’s a niche market, one that is handled easily by imports- other than foo “medicinal use” of course.
That’s really not a very good argument, dude. And- the scholarly articles are all restricted, that was one of the better articles. It is an interesting claim. Do you have a better reason why I should reject it?
I think you were the one insisting that Ford was interested in soy rather than hemp, and that his ‘hemp car’ was actually made out of soy materials.
Now, I don’t have a dog in the fight about Ford’s hemp car. Really, this thread is the first place I heard of it. But when I googled it, the source material I found said that it was, in fact, a hemp car. Namely the panels those thugs were trying to smash with sledgehammers in the middle of winter to no effect (not even a dent!) were in fact made out of some kind of hemp plastic. Lighter and stronger than steel!
Maybe you’re right, I dunno. Do you have a cite that would dissuade me from believing the source video’s claim that it is hemp? If it is hemp, this looks like an awesome application. If it is actually soy, I think I still want my car to be made out of this stuff. Have you ever had the annoying experience of grazing something with your car and watching your plastic bumper fall apart?(I haven’t done that but I’ve noticed) Or your car door getting dented by some space cadet who backs into it? It could be that hemp can relieve these problems, if not for the actions of DuPont et al.
Your whole thread is annoying for this reason. “It could be . . .” “I heard that and I’m not going to stop believing that until you prove a negative.” That’s not debate.
You can talk about DuPont and racism all you want. Presumably DuPont doesn’t still have a stranglehold on Congress, and most people associate dope use with dirty white hippies these days. What’s the modern day version of the CT?
For one thing it is self-referencial. It talks about Ford’s fuel work, and then quote a hemp advocate to declare that Ford was thwarted by hemp being illegal. That is poor sourcing to say the least!
There are these thing called ‘books’. They carry a lot more information and are less susceptible to google-bombing.
As I noted, if you read books about the man you might have found out his interest in Agronomy. And one trait of agronomists of that era is that they were not very interested in non-food crops.
Here: Henry Ford and His Employees
Ford’s interest in Soy is well established. Read up on the River Rouge plant sometime and then tell me what magic place he built these ‘hemp panels’ in because there’s no mention of it in any other factory of his and there are plenty of books written on the history of auto factories.
It is good stuff, but there might be something not being mentioned., such as excess use of crops, large amounts of labor.
Not really, I have not owned a car in over 10 years.
You must understand there are problems with any material. Nothing is perfect and if someone tells you it is…be suspicious. Just seeing some guy whack a panel with hammer is not proof of miracles. I used to do demo with the advanced plastic panels that were Saturn’s joy when they first came out. Now look at them.
I love Big Business CTs because they so often ignore the fact that [the Next Great Suppressed Technology] would, if it were that Great, in most cases be equally attractive to the Evil Big Business to monopolize. Sometimes the CT is a bit more sophisticated, “explaining” that the NGST is uniquely uncommercializable because [insert some reason NGST can be practiced by Everyman for three cents a year and requires no infrastructure, etc.]. The OP and the hempheads don’t even bother with a plausible premise for why the millions of commercial applications for hemp couldn’t just as easily been the subject of a massive, conspiratorial oligopaly run by the DuPonts and Standard Oil. “Oh, but they were dedicated to oil.” Yes, and would remain so for exactly as long as oil was not less profitable than the hemp products. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company doesn’t sell or import that much tea these days, 'cause they adapted.
None of the products I’ve heard talked about in the OP’s hemp links sounds like the sort of thing Joe Everyman could make at home – getting ethanol out of hemp, or making it into plastic, is going to require some fairly heavy duty industrial infrastructure, of just the sort that Evil BBs are readily familiar with. The fact that they are not rushing to monopolize this sort of business and (as has repeatedly been noted) the fact that the hemp “industry” historically and today isn’t fabulously and uniquely financially successful anywhere in the world tells me (without offending Occam) why no one’s rushing to overturn the law.
Saturns used to be made out of that sort of plastic. I owned a couple and you could do the old sledgehammer trick on a body panel and it’d bounce right back. It’s hardly a secret miracle material, being as they made something like 2+ million cars like that. wiki “*All of the original Saturns featured dent-resistant plastic body panels which were also touted as allowing the company to change the look of the vehicles readily. However, in practice, the company did not take advantage of this capability often, due to flammability concerns.” *
Try2b, you don’t need a great debate on this, nor do you have to enter into hypothetical discussions. DrDeth hit the nail on the head above. Since hemp production is legal virtually everywhere except for the U.S., and can be imported here, this debate is nonsensical.
The experiment to determine if this is a conspiracy has been ongoing throughout the world for decades. Because “The world” has chosen to ignore hemp. Doesn’t that give you a clue that all of the non-recreational uses for it are, well, smoke and mirrors? Or do you really think that the rest of the industrial world - Europe, China, Japan, Canada, etc. - is ignoring hemp in order to support U.S. racial policies? If production gave them any edge, they’d be producing it. It’s that simple.
My head is still spinning from the 9/11 thread to be frank, so I’m not sure how to break though to you.
To repeat:
Right. But then what is the point in outlawing something that is both useless (from a corporate-other-than-Levi’s et al standpoint) and harmless? Why bother? Ask the question and you encounter race discrimination, shady business and all the rest. All those reasons have been exposed as unsound, yet we still have this jim-crow vestige hanging around the law books, raising curious questions. I don’t understand it, but let’s not make too big a deal out of it.
Maybe in the '30s hemp had potential (or perceived potential) to compete with oil. With the introduction of advanced biofuels, there is no motive for hempfuel today (except maybe for the ‘get off my land’ do-it-yourselfer types). The bigger threat is that we’re being bilked to subsidize corn ethanol, a multi-billion dollar loser headed irreversibly toward a dead end- and likely which is an even worse performer than hemp in terms of energy yield. Do you like paying for that garbage? Sometimes I just don’t understand our world.
But, who said anything about conspiracies? There is an important line between cts and realpolitik. Real government and real business are shady. It’s not a conspiracy per se.
(And that 911 business was just an exploration, not a promotion, of cts. Sorry if that one upset you. I was new.)
Because it’s NOT useless. Rather, it can be used to make it more difficult for drug enforcement officials to determine whether a field contains hemp or marijuana. In other words, it can serve a useful purpose – to prevent enforcement of the law.
Thereby backing entirely off your OP and all the specious “wonder plant” claims you credulously c&p’d from stoner sites and expected us to affirmatively debunk. Nice one.
It was. Hemp was just one of the stringy cellulose fibers he used for filler.
This page gets all CT towards the end, but gives the basic chemistry: http://www.hempplastic.com/newSite/hp_aboutplastics_fordcar.htm
The Ford Museum says about the same thing: Soybean Car - The Henry Ford
That’s interesting, thanks for the link. This part isn’t a great debate because it was both a soy and a hemp car :smack:
Otherwise I think this thread is going off the rails a little. Because of a misunderstanding of my question. That’s ok. Point is, whether hemp seems like a great crop for this or that purpose is irrelevant to the question of why it is illegal. Other countries’ free laws on the subject are constantly cited. Pot is still generally illegal around the world AFAIK, so where exactly is the hangup?
In fact, if a hemp strain had a lettuce-like THC level such that it escaped that ban, wouldn’t it in effect be legal? Or is there more to the ban than that?