Cannabis Study House - ＵＳＡ・ヘンプ・ミュージアム、ヘンプと環境、地球温暖化

地球温暖化

RE
GLOBAL WARMING: FACING UP...

COMMENTARY SUBMITTED TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES Op-Ed Commentary
ATTN: Robert Berger, NOV 10, 1999.

In a recent editorial, the Times stated: "In recent months climatologists have come to agree that global warming is a certainty and that government should take economical steps to prepare for it." Nowhere in the editorial was mention made of the cause of the global warming, also known as the greenhouse effect, or steps that should be taken to mitigate and reverse global warming. While the earth shows natural periods of cooling and warming over the eons, what we are faced with at the present is a people-made problem, that may well have people-made solutions.

First, let's look at the problem. Picture the earth like a giant greenhouse, the sun shines in and warms the earth. A portion of the light bounces back toward space, but is reflected back by the roof of the greenhouse, adding to the warming effect. In our picture, greenhouse gasses trapped in the atmosphere act as the roof of the earth greenhouse. The people part of the problem is that we put these gasses into the atmosphere as a result of our industry and lifestyle over the past two hundred years.

The most important greenhouse gas, because of its volume in the atmosphere, is carbon dioxide or CO2. This natural gas we animals breath out as a result of our metabolism is breathed in by plants, which use the carbon in leaves, roots, flowers, or wood and give off oxygen or O2, which animals breath in. This is called a natural cycle of life.

Teach your kids about this cycle, and learn about this yourself. It is not too strong to say the future of the planet earth depends on how fast we learn this lesson. The problem is with fossil fuels, petroleum oil, coal, and natural gas from these fuels. Removed from the atmosphere by plants during the age of dinosaurs and huge amounts of vegetation, excess carbon formed pools of oil, fields of coal, and pockets of gas beneath the surface of the earth.

The end results of burning any carbon substance, if burned cleanly, are carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O). The more fossil fuel we burn, the more CO2 goes into the atmosphere. Couple this with the rapid destruction of forest and rainforest acreage, which would naturally remove and store CO2 as wood, and we see the concentration of CO2 has doubled in the last 50 years. With the many other volatile people-produced chemicals (methane and remember CFC's?) that act as greenhouse gasses we have the makings of an ecological disaster.

Carbon dioxide from which plants make cellulose is the dominant greenhouse gas due to the heavy fossil fuel burning of the past two centuries. When cellulose is made into building materials, paper, plastics, or textiles, greenhouse carbon is removed from the atmosphere and recycled into these items. Hemp does this best.

Good old wood alcohol is the simplest of alcohols with only one carbon atom. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. September, 1989. "The Case for Methanol."

I want to propose a solution, because doing nothing or trying to adapt to a climate shift could mean missed opportunity now. I prefer to think of this as an opportunity to recycle some of the 80% of the oil reserves of the U.S. burned in the last decades. How do we recycle CO2 out of the atmosphere? Grow green plants.

Better still grow the agricultural crop that pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere better than any other. Our lives may depend on it. Use the plant in place of trees for paper and building materials, in place of fossil fuels as fuel for cars and trucks and as feed stocks for plastics, in place of cotton for fabrics, in place of corn for animal and people food, and for thousands of other products we use daily.

There is an old saying: "Anything that can be made from hydrocarbons (coal, oil, natural gas) can be made from carbohydrates(plant material)." We even know how to make synthetic gasoline from plants. What I'm trying to show here is that there are solutions. One of these is hemp.

Richard M. Davis,
U. S. A. HEMP MUSEUM Curator

http://hempmuseum.org/
Un-Copyright 2003 USA HEMP MUSEUM. SPREAD THE WORD All rights NOT reserved

▲