🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MPG.17883d872b43c11a989e3c@shawnews.vn.shawcable.net>, tnr says...
>
>In article <afkbi90307a@drn.newsguy.com>, nospam@mybox.org says...
>>In article <MPG.17870385780939ef989e35@shawnews.vn.shawcable.net>, tnr says...

(about replacing petroleum with olive or other vegetable oil)

>> >
>> >Sorry, I had been counting on a bit of insight. Number of barrels is 
>> >certainly not hard to increase to pretty much any level you want,
>> 
>> Really?   On whose land?  Under whose authority?  
>
>Yes, the land of anyone who wants to do so and the usual, respectively.

Insight?  You proposed the necessity, I didn't.   Try it on for size.

Can you just for a moment consider the amount of land required to produce
oil-producing crops enough to supply the synthetic rope of the world?  Can you
please consider the number of human beings you'd have to eliminate in order to
free that land from food production?

Good.

Now compare that with the amount of land needed for direct hemp fibre
production.
  
>>Right.  Sorry, I forgot about that.   We'll have trees that grow lemon-drops and
>>gold bullion, too.  Are you sure you haven't been smoking some of that old rope?
>
>You should study some more science.

I was referring sarcastically to the problem of land-use elaborated above.  
Sure, it's quite possible that plants can be manipulated to directly produce
what are now petroleum extracts and synthetics... but is there enough arable
space on which to grow them?  Not unless the same plants can be found which both
feed humanity and produce its petrochemicals.

i.e.:  it's not remotely practical, so forget it.

 
>>> I'd be willing to bet it will be long before we run out of the original stuff.
>
>>Petroleum, you mean?   We will probably be forced to stop using it long before
>Yes.
>
>>we run out of it.  In fact, I'd be willing to bet we'll be forced to move human
>> settlement away from most coastlines before we run out of it.
>
>Ahhh you're a global warmer.

Huh?  I'm just stating a fact.  That doesn't mean I think it's the way things
ought to be... I just don't believe humanity's leaders, as a group, will see to
it that we abandon the use of the stuff until it threatens their own death (or
perhaps their bankruptcy.)

>> What's your point, and what does it have to do with the prohibition on hemp?
>
>My point? You're kidding right? Somebody mentioned that synthetics 
>weren't a god substitute rope material because they required the use of 
>petroleum, apparently this was a negative factor in the use of 
>synthetics because petroleum was claimed to be non-renewable and now 
>because of global warming. Hmmmm, that was you. 

It is non-renewable in the sense that there isn't time to replenish the supply
once it's gone... this merely assumes that we could somehow mitigate or learn to
live with the effects of its continued use until it runs out.  I don't claim
anywhere that the facts as we know them bear this assumption out.

The presence and increasing rate of global warming is one reason I believe that
the facts *don't* bear that assumption out.   I don't think there's enough time
to find the means properly to adapt or mitigate.

That time *might* be found if we stopped depending on so much petrochemical
stuff for which perfectly good short-term renewables could substitute well.

More science?  Hemp fibre is carbon removed from the atmosphere only weeks
ago... nylon/polypropylene/rayon/polyester fibre is carbon removed from the air
before our species evolved, and from the re-introduction of which our atmosphere
might well become the most potent and persistent enemy our species has ever
faced.

>I think my point was 
>pretty clear: "petroleum is unlikely to be non-renewable in the long 
>term".

In the strictest practical sense, you're absolutely right: our continued use of
it will wipe us from the face of the earth before we run out of places to find
and gather it.
--
P