Why Industrial Hemp deserves Biden’s Two Trillion-dollar Climate Plan Pledge.
By Clayton Turner
President Joe Biden has pledged 2 trillion over four years to significantly escalate the use of clean energy in the transportation, electricity and building sectors. This money may go to processes like lithium mining for batteries, solar panel construction, charging stations for electric cars, wind power, and any number of alternative clean energy options.
Elon Musk has proposed 100 million dollars as a prize to those who would capture carbon from the atmosphere. Money is becoming available to solve the greatest threat to our children’s collective future, but what is the threat, and what are the things hemp can help solve?
We all know the concept of global warming, global climate change, and the increase in storms, droughts, rain, snow and other extreme weather. The icecaps are melting at an alarming rate. Coastlines will be impacted by sea level rise.
Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the World Economic Forum, in a report called The New Plastics Economy stated plainly that by 2050 we will have more plastic in the ocean than fish if current trends continue. Plastic production currently accounts for more than 1 gigaton of global carbon emissions.
Estimates for global carbon emissions run from 28 gigatons to 43 gigatons per year. The earth by some estimates can sequester 24 gigatons. Much of this carbon capture is done by the ocean, which also creates 60% of the world’s oxygen.
There is genuine concern that as ocean acid levels rise, ocean health diminishes. That this acid rise could create a series of dominoes falling, starting with plankton, that would be detrimental to life as we know it on earth.
Oil companies are by far are the biggest contributors of carbon to the atmosphere with 20 firms being responsible for 35% of global carbon emissions. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the world’s carbon emissions according to the CDP Carbon Major’s Report.
So, given that they are number one, let us start with fuel. How can hemp help with fuel use? Texas oil companies are getting wise to hemp the writing is on the wall when it comes to oil industry prices, and the environmental cost of continued rampant carbon use.
They are starting to see hemp is the future. Hemp can be processed into cellulosic ethanol, syngas, a clean burning DME alternate gas-based fuel, seeds can be processed into biofuel, hemp plastic filler, cellulosic plastics and hemp seed oil plastics can be made.
Starch plastics can be made that are biodegradable without potential harm to the environment like oxo-degradable plastics. Building materials can be made from hemp far more effectively than today’s building materials, some of these hemp building materials actively sequester carbon.
By clean burning our hemp crop we can generate additional profit streams of hemp from advanced hemp graphene carbon analogs, energy generation, and sequestration of the hemp biomass carbon off gas into clean burning fuel. Using organic and regenerative farming practices, we can limit many pesticide and nutrient run offs to rivers, lakes, and oceans.
Hemp sequesters radiation from the soil, pesticides and heavy metals. This includes creating “carbon walls” and aquifers to clean water as it travels to water ways. Like a water filter for the earth’s water ways.
NASA will want Hemp. When one looks to space hemp can make 50,000 products, and is an amazing food crop, which also has medicinal effects. You can turn it into a building material, clean radiation out of Martian soil, make plastic, fuels, protein, cleaning solvents and medicine. Planting it will also clean the Martian soil of chlorine, which is at a .05 level, this may take some genetic work to make the perfect plant to clean the soil but given the massively impressive growth rate it is the ideal plant for this process.
To bring us back down to earth, we have 2 billion acres farmable land in the USA alone. If we were to farm even a couple of million acres, we would revolutionize industry in the USA, but also sequester many tens of gigatons of carbon.
An acre of industrial hemp sequesters more carbon than an acre of rainforest. An acre of industrial hemp can produce massive amounts of food, fuel, solvents, industrial fibers, and meta-materials.
Hemp can grow three crops a year in some areas. Batteries, steel, fiberglass, glass, plastic, string, rope, cloth, building materials all these items have improvements that can be made to them with hemp derivatives.
We do not need to invent a way to save the world. We just need to implement the plan. Centralized carbon neutral or negative facilities doing multiple types of hemp processing, while capturing conversion of biomass to energy and energy products, using efficiencies of footprint, personnel, Vertical integration, distribution, diversification of products to insulate against market fluctuations, extraction, plastics, oil, graphene advanced carbons, food products, cloth, aerogel, decortication, drying, milling, all tracking everything in an immutable blockchain.
Because hemp is a new industry we can build in social equity of our own accord at the beginning, from the ground up. We can implement green initiatives and show the way to other industries because we are putting in new infrastructure not inheriting old non-green infrastructure. Because hemp famously touches 50,000 products, we can use our innovations in hemp to touch all industries.
This is the future, and it is not decades away, it is right now, every day. Every hemp plant in the ground is a metaphorical brick, a brick in a structure of an elevator to space through a carbon free atmosphere. To every farmer, advocate, and everyone in the industry: If we wake up in the morning, then make it a priority daily, we can make it happen!
An energy independent future, sustainability, social conscience, it is going to happen no matter what, it is inevitable, but we need to keep our planet livable until we get there. This is a race, and everyone who participates wins because the outcome is a better future for all of us, when one of us crosses the finish line we all win together.