🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MPG.178963beb7fdc62f989e40@shawnews.vn.shawcable.net>, tnr says...
>
>In article <afo2dd01jtp@drn.newsguy.com>, nospam@mybox.org says...
>>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.
>
>Mmmm? What "necessity" exactly did I propose? 

Sorry... the screen was getting too cluttered and I cut that part rather than
editing out all the quote-markings.

And by the way, I've grown to like your style... I don't agree with you, but you
make me think rather than just telling me I'm an idiot.   It shows a respect I
didn't expect from you and I owe you the same.   I've been condescending and
even insulting about my disagreement with you sometimes, and I owe you an
apology for that.

Consider the apology offered.

What you proposed was the necessity for applying some insight.

>> 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.
>
>Excuse me but you are claiming there is enough land for hemp production 
>so your real claim is this: no amount of selective breeding, gene 
>tinkering, splicing, etc. will ever produce a plant that can make as 
>much synthetic rope (would it still be synthetic?) per acre planted as 
>hemp would make natural rope [per acre planted]. This is a very extreme 
>claim for you to be making. What knowledge do you have that leads you to 
>put forward such a proposition?

I ought to flesh it out then, since you've mistaken what I meant.

The claim I make is this: because the bulk of the non-water mass of a hemp plant
is fibre useful for the production of rope, fabric... whatever, there are lots
of uses for the sort of fibre that comes from the various varieties of hemp;

because in order to be competitive with petroleum, such plants would either have
to be harvested to produce more petrochemical-fibre-value than the fibre/mass
ratio of a hemp plant or excrete such product while remaining alive long enough
to outproduce hemp, *and* would have to consume less land resources that the
pumping of oil/gas does;

because I think it very unlikely that genetic research (and I am an optomist on
that front) can produce plants as cost-effective on a fiber-for-land basis in
the short time necessary for the world to switch to those sources before direct
petrochemical fibre manufacture's contribution ends with the destruction of the
planet's human habitability;

I think the pursuit of having plants take over the manufacture of what are now
"petrochemicals" in the current sense of the word is a pipe-dream.

Does that clarify it sufficiently?

>> i.e.:  it's not remotely practical, so forget it.
>
>Did you know that Man was never meant to fly and that the earth is the 
>centre of rotation for the solar system?

I didn't know the first part.  It's obviously not something deduced from man's
inherent capability, since he plainly *can* fly.  It's true that he needs to
create mechanical means to help him to do that, but he's inherently capable to
do so, or he wouldn't have managed it.  I'd like you to show me that he wasn't
meant to, if you have (or your country's economy has) the time and the
resources.

The second part is a deduction made from fairly elemetary physics and concluded
from observations that bear out the reasoning.  If I hadn't already learned it,
I could easily be shown the truth of that.

Back to oil...

>>>>> 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
>
>Whose fact?

Mine.  I said what I believe (or rather, what I'm willing to bet on,) about what
will happen in consequence of the likely behaviour of humanity's leaders... and
my belief is a fact.

I might be wrong - I most devoutly *hope* I'm wrong - but it's fact that I
believe what I said.

>>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
>
>According to you. What is your background in synthetic petroleum 
>production?

I have none.   Few people have any.  If it were practical and economical at
present, I'd like to think it would already be happening (or at least proposed
in earnest) on a massive scale... but it isn't, and I believe there are a
variety of reasons for that - not least among which is the possibility that it
would wreck the established petroleum production industry.

Before you ask: the petroleum production industry already has a huge
technological, financial and material investment in doing things more or less as
they are done now... and that investment is partly destroyed and hugely
disrupted if they are forced into the radical change that your idea represents.

You're suggesting a cultural change, a political change, a power-structure
change and a sweeping change of technological thought, all in one go.

It ain't gonna happen, because humans don't work that way.  Not in the world I
grew up in, they don't.

>> 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
>
>More? So far you haven't preented any science.
>
>>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
>
>That's amazing! How do the hempplants know to only take carbon from the 
>atmosphere that has been recently introduced?

You're being silly, I hope.   The fact that a hemp plant was recently alive
means that only recently, it was removing carbon from the air... and thus that
the carbon it contains is carbon currently in circulation in the biosphere.

What I said (or what I intended you to infer, using a bit of insight,) was this:

When you use hemp fibre, you are using currently-circulating carbon stores only
set aside for the short term, and when that fibre rots, it returns that carbon
to circulation... the net result on current carbon circulation is zero.

When you use petrochemical fibres, that presupposes that you have already
brought petroleum out of the ground... carbon that was taken out of circulation
millions of years before our species came to be, in an era when life was adapted
to a *far* more carbon-rich air supply than we evolved to... and you are placing
(barring total recycling) a good deal of that carbon back into circulation in
tha atmosphere.   We bury them or toss them into the sea or *burn* them when
we're done with them... in large part, they degrade one way or another into
atmospheric carbon... and that part that does so turns mostly into CO2: into
*the* primary greenhouse gas.

Every milligram of that fibre re-contributes carbon whose removal *created* the
current biosphere.

Beginning to see a problem with this stuff yet?

>>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.
>
>Or we'll find cheap ways to make it or make directly the end products 
>for which we now use petroleum.

I'd like to believe your alternative is likely to come to pass... but I don't.

There are too many greedy, short-sighted and even stupid people in charge of the
world's "means of production" to make it possible, I'm afraid.

It's the same sort of people nearly 3/4 of a century ago who outlawed hemp
because of its threat to their industries, remember?
--
P