AkA, saving the world with hemp (and kelp); a simple plan for mass re-edenization.

Estimates say along with simply reducing carbon emissions, we need to have sequestered 7-9 billion tons of carbon a year for every year until the warming levels off [source] (an interesting goal is getting it much lower than 1.5° over industrial averages but that 1.5° is what neolibs who acknowledge the issue have in mind when discussing it. Why do they love it being sliiiiiightly warmer tho? Geoengineering for capitalism reasons? That doesn’t sound super sustainable.  What if we dropped it way down and got into biodoming in inhospitable areas, since that’s technology we haven’t perfected yet, even though it’s entirely necessary for any kind of off-planet colony.  It takes a long time to test even a working model, and we barely do any studies or practice runs of any length currently).

If we don’t reduce carbon output in tandem with sequestration, then, in order to keep carbon at current levels, we have to capture 20 billion tons a year. [Source]

An acre of hemp captures between 10-15 tons of CO2 a year, put in hectares, 0.4 ha captures 10-15 tons of CO2 a year, depending on final hemp product [source]….ie, just growing it and, say, mulching it (which is NOT composting it, for the record; mulching is a process that typically means drying it which breaks it down faster without as much of the offgasingthat occurs in compost production) without burning it, is the minimum 10 tons a year captured per acre (or half hectare). Using the hemp in carbon-reducing endproducts would dial it up to that maximum of 15.

So, 2 billion acres or, 810 million ha, is needed to keep carbon at current levels, which, as noted above, NEEDS further improvement (ie actually lowering the amount of carbon from the current level) for optimality (eg decreasing global rates of violence, including wars but also simple interpersonal-level violent crime etc, which has been shown to be worsened by higher local temperatures).

20 billion tons of capture needed + 10 tons of capture per acre minimum = 2 billion acres of hemp needed aka 810 million ha needed

Let’s look at options for placement…..which brings us to, the global greening effort that is currently underway already:

“Four football fields of land degrade into desert every second. That equates to an area almost as large as Ethiopia each year. Could efforts to restore and reforest this arid terrain bear fruit?” [Source]

Hemp is a good answer to this, because it’s so hardy and fast to grow/spread; that’s  why they call it “weed”.  Sidenote, although most know: the term “marijuana” was spread by the pulp mill lobby and in particular, the newspaper merchant W. R. Hearst, specifically because hemp is a superior product, but inferior from the capitalist point of view which prioritizes planned obsolescence (hemp lasts much longer than paper, this is in part why the declaration of independence has preserved so well, it is written on hemp pulp as opposed to wood pulp from our precious life-sustaining trees) and also slave labor via incarceration for invented “crimes” like smoking cannabis…more replacement equals more consumer money spent, and more criminalization means more people jailed, which means more labor hours can be extracted.

From the article quoted above:

Nearly one half of the planet’s land mass is on the brink of turning into nonarable desert, according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

These already-arid lands are marked by low rainfall yet support 45% of the world’s agriculture. Now, extreme drought linked to human-made global heating is helping to transform this area into an infertile wasteland.

With one in three of the world’s people living in these drylands, experts say that food insecurity, poverty, and mass displacement will accompany desertification.

The problem is so severe that a United Nations desertification conference (COP16) happening in Saudi Arabia in December is demanding that 1.5 billion hectares of the world’s desertified land be restored by 2030. This is the area the UN says could be rehabilitated

In acres thats 3.7 billion. That is 1 billion more than is needed for hemp to merely stabilize the warming. Only half of the 1.5 billion would even need to be hemp, to keep things “habitable” (the current status quo is only “habitable” in sarcasm quotes, which means barely habitable and certainly not ideal).

It would seem to make sense that hemp, which has so many applications ie, is useful for so many things, could be used initially for this project, regardless of whether it would be an “invasive” longterm (see below regarding “invasive”)…hemp has grown wild in many places where it has, within decades, been entirely eradicated.  So, its clearly possible, even easy, to get rid of it, if and when it’s deemed unnecessary, eg after climate stabilization/improvement and glacier regrowth.  It is of course up to home governments in each of the places undertaking de-desertification, what to use for the initial greening, although, unfortunately, there’s something ominous in the way that drug laws have been effectively globalized from the hegemonic capitalist core, impacting local anti-hemp legislation/policy locally, everywhere. However, since in addition to being useful for building materials, textiles, vegetable oil, livestock feed etc, it’s also super-efficient at carbon capture and very low-input to grow…there may be no better short term alternative, and certainly, many less effective at addressing all these issues.  Some will suggest high-input alternatives or “native plants” but consider the archeological evidence indicating that hemp grew and was used throughout much of the world for all of history and much of prehistory.  (No colonial records exist of its use on Turtle Island, according to Wikipedia and at least one source cited there, but consider how accessible Asia is from Alaska today, and consider archeological evidence).  Its not “invasive” anywhere.  It’s simply to-be “reintroduced.” Consider also, the anecdotes of those alive in the 1950s, who observed massive groves of hemp plants being systematically erased from the landscape; they assumed (wrongly) that the settlers had brought it and it had spread everywhere within a few hundred years. That is false history.

Regardless, it would stand to reason that whatever is planted should be chosen for optimality in terms of carbon sequestration (atmospheric carbon driving up temperatures being a leading cause of desertification in the first place) while still being something that will actually grow…weed is hardy but maybe there’s room to tease greater hardiness out of the genetics, no doubt expert consulting would pay off in terms of where to go for seeds from strains that are already desert-proven.

Presumably the UN and local governments have surveyed or are currently surveying, exactly where to develop these 1.5 billion hectares (aka 3.7 billion acres, or, 1.7 billion more acres than the minimum area needed for hemp alone to mitigate the warming caused by CO2).

Reiterating figures above vis a vis the amount of hemp growing space needed to stabilize the average global temperature by capturing the excess carbon that drives it up: 

810 million ha of hemp alone would be needed just to level it off, and 1.5 billion ha are currently readily available, given sufficient government willingness place to place. A futher half billion hectares of growing space might be accommodated…even if everything else goes perfectly in terms of getting the crops down and having them all live and capture their minimum projected amounts of carbon, 810 million ha will only keep things as they currently are, without any challenges to current industries other than Not Expanding, so, good luck legislating around all their hired goons and lobbyists as they try to keep profit maximizing without consideration  toward other factors (aka business as usual for these antisocial coin stackers).

Let’s look at the 4.8 billion hectares of agricultural land globally in use right now.

Only 7% of earth’s surface possesses the features necessary for cropping without added water etc, so that’s 2.5 billion ha, again 4.8 billion is used for all food production total. In acres (2.47 × 1 hectare) this 2.5 billion becomes about 6 billion, the 4.8 billion becomes about 9 billion.

To feed the global population (!!!!given existing dietary habits!!!!) 4.1 billion ha is needed for food.

4.8 – 4.1 = 0.7   [ie, just using the existing fallow land alone is not going to work without dipping into the de-desertification allotment, unless changes to food production are made*. And if you ask people, cake or death, they’re prone to saying “is the cake vegetarian? I’ll take the death please.” Ravenousness is an illness that is difficult to combat.  That feels like too much time spent of very little time to work within.  So, other space must be found ie the non-agriculturally allocated greening projects].

Again, we need 2 billion acres or 810 million ha for hemp alone, at a minimum (more is clearly needed, keeping global temperatures at 1.5° above industrial levels is actually not a good idea for a variety of reasons).  

1.5 billion ha are already earmarked for de-desertification.

0.7 billion ha are available from agricultural land without adjusting anything about current food production globally.

1.5 + 0.7 = 2.2 billion ha, and about one third of that is the necessary amount for leveling.  So, this is enough to stabilize, and perhaps even lower temperatures.  (Again, we want them lower…emissions have to go down, so even if we aren’t changing anything else, that has to change, atmospheric carbon levels have to drop, not level off.)

Can we get more out of our land use than we currently are, ie, is there FURTHER re-allocation potential? 

livestock accounts for 80% of agricultural land use. Most of the world’s agricultural land is used to raise livestock for meat and dairy. [Source]

*If the world goes mostly vegetarian the area needed for crop production goes down say 75% which means we would only need 1.25 billion hectares for food, freeing up 3.75 billion hectares for hemp or whatever else (vegetarian chow overflow/wiggleroom…feed the world, end the wars…two links here, read em and learn). That’s a lot of space compared to the 0.7 billion ha (700 million ha) available if we (meaning, the industrialized world) don’t improve (or worsen) our diets in any way.

 

Let’s go further and identify the current key sites for combating desertification and add up their land areas:

So we’ve got the Gobi (great green wall project), the Sahara (also a great green wall project, 100 million hectares), maybe some potential in Cameroon, Mauritania and Niger, the Kubuqi desert greening project in China….these all have area numbers…..literally this part is a bunch of other people’s jobs that they are assigned to handle by their governments.  I’ll check in with further information but the point is demonstrating the math of it all as simply as possible, which, see the paragraphs above.

Also: here is the current kelp range (kelp needs certain depths/temps/etc) and the potential range/total grow space available CAN BE calculated from that, if anyone is posting specific figures, which, this author hasn’t found yet:

Seems like a lot of potential in terms of increasing our carbon capture capacity.

Kelp is also very useful, although no one has come up with fireproof bricks made of kelp, yet.  (Think of hempcrete next time you’re cutting out airmaking, weather-stabilizing forests to make houses that rot or burn down).