Help Save the Earth, Time to Subsitute Hemp for Oil

By Dara Colwell, AlterNet. Posted June 18, 2009.

"If all the diesel engines today were converted to use hemp biodiesel, you could wipe out world hunger while providing a natural balance to global warming" says Paul Stanford of the Hemp and Cannabis Foundation, which has worked to end marijuana prohibition and restore industrial hemp.

As hemp, which has a short harvesting period (roughly 120 days for seed), grows it sequesters, or captures, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Because biofuels emit less carbon dioxide when burned, more carbon is actually absorbed by the plants used to produce it. So, as more hemp grows, more carbon dioxide would be sucked out of the atmosphere.

"Growing hemp would improve air quality -- isn't that good enough reason to do it?" says Chris Conrad, a respected authority on cannabis and industrial hemp and who wrote Hemp, Lifeline to the Future. Only Conrad, who also teaches at Oaksterdam University, America's only cannabis college, in Oakland, Calif., knows his question is rhetorical. America is the world's only industrialized nation to prohibit the growing of industrial hemp.

That's because the Drug Enforcement Administration has historically lumped hemp in with marijuana, although the plants are different breeds of Cannabis sativa, just as Great Danes and Chihuahuas are different breeds of Canine familiaris.

While hemp contains minute levels of THC, marijuana's psychoactive ingredient (compare 0.3 in Canadian industrial hemp versus 3-20 for medical marijuana), to get high you would have to smoke a whole field of it -- but you'd probably get a headache first. Still, because marijuana has been the most politicized plant in American history, a history of smear campaigns flaming public hysteria and far too lengthy to address here, hemp hasn't escaped the association with its distant cousin.

In 1937, America passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which criminalized cannabis and levied high taxes ($1 per ounce) on medical marijuana and industrial hemp. Although growing hemp wasn't technically disallowed, the law made it prohibitively expensive, so it fell into decline.

Hemp experienced a short resurgence during World War II, when the government launched an aggressive campaign to grow hemp in the face of a severe fiber shortage. In 1944, the National Farmers Union called for the widest use of hemp within the American market, according to documents on the North American Industrial Hemp Council Web site, for hemp was always considered an essential American crop -- as American as the first pair of Levi's made from hemp fiber in 1849.

But after the war, hemp production again faded away, perhaps because the DEA has always maintained it can't differentiate between industrial hemp and marijuana, a seemingly American shortcoming.

As it stands, we can't grow hemp but we can import it, and we do, in the form of clothing, bath towels, rugs, food and car components from Canada, China and Europe, which have utilized the crop to bolster their economies. Last year, annual hemp retail sales in North America amounted to $300 million.

Our legal quandary has hurt us economically, but the environmental impact is just as great. For example, California, an agricultural giant that nets $36.6 billion dollars a year, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, is the world's 12th-largest carbon emitter and a state with a reputation for being an environmental maverick.

In September 2006, California passed Assembly Bill 32, announcing its compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, a move Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger celebrated by exclaiming, "The global warming debate is over!" But four days later, Schwarzenegger vetoed, for the second time, a bill to legalize the growth of industrial hemp, stating the measure conflicted with federal law.

If California, which grows cotton -- one of the most water and pesticide intensive crops in the world, could legally replace cotton with hemp, it could clean up the environment while supplying the domestic market with a crop that has thousands of applications. In 2005, cotton was worth $630 million to the state (although the industry is shrinking due to globalization). According to "Illegally Green: Environmental Costs of Hemp Prohibition," a report written by analyst Skaidra Smith-Heisters and issued by the Reason Foundation, hemp produces more fiber and uses half the irrigation water and nitrogen fertilizer that cotton does.

"If hemp was freed up of its legal hassles, it would encourage the business climate to implement small-scale solutions, and you would see all kinds of innovation coming from this," says Smith-Heisters.

But until industrial hemp is legalized, innovation will have to come from overseas, or over the Canadian border. "Our lack of infrastructure is a great disgrace. We were once the leader in hemp technology, and we voluntarily absented ourselves from one of the most important global resources that exists," says Conrad. "We'll keep losing and face economic and environmental collapse if we remain afraid of this plant."

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Dara Colwell is a freelance writer in San Francisco.

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