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Brew Your Own Auto Fuel For 41 Cents A Gallon
Iphtashu Fitz writes "Damon Toal-Rossi of Iowa City, Iowa had enough of the high price of gasoline, so it didn't take too much for his friend to talk him into switching to biodiesel, an alternative fuel based on soy or vegetable oil. But after a few months of driving 10 miles to a biodiesel fuel station he decided it was time to start brewing his own. It didn't take him long to find a recipe for biodiesel, and with used cooking oil that he gets for free from a nearby restaurant, he figures he's now getting 44 miles per gallon out of his diesel powered VW Golf and only paying 41 cents a gallon. According to the National Biodiesel Board the number of biodiesel stations in the US rose by 50% last year (to a whopping 200). The president of the American Soybean Association claims biodiesel has almost the same amount of energy as petroleum-based diesel, but cleans an engine's fuel injectors and cuts down on the number of required oil changes. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why diesel powered cars are making a comeback in the US."
Right, but what excuse will be left for American hegemony?
I suppose it could take the form of pushing fast food around the world so that there is more used oil to make biodiesel. It then becomes a "national security" issue to control the waste disposal of every country in the world.
Damn... even Tom Clancy can't make up shit this good!
Paper comes from fast growing trees planted specifically for that purpose, so using hemp as a fiber would not cut down on deforestation (you are better off claiming you want to use hemp as a replacement for cotton, which uses a lot of water.)
As far as using hemp oil as a biodiesel source, it is possible but there are better oil producing plants out there so why choose an inferior source of vegetable oil?
Dude, if you want to light up a blunt just say so. Do not try to wrap your argument around some BS economic justification about how "the man" wants to hide all of the great secondary hemp products that would somehow be superior to what we are now using. Once petroleum-based products like nylon replaced hemp as a rope fiber the only real economic niche that hemp occupied disappeared. The problem with trying to make an economic case here is that when cheaper alternatives are brought up as counter-claims your main argument becomes weaker and the longer you cling to it the more it looks to others like you are just being deceptive. Say that you want to indulge in recreational cannabis use and that the parts of the plant that you do not want have a minor economic value. No one is fooled for a second when you try to reverse your argument.
To test out your arguments, try this one. If industrial hemp (which has an almost non-existent level of THC) was legalized in the US, but _only_ a variety which carried a terminator gene that would kill any other related plants that were unlucky enough to have a speck of the GMO plant's pollen land on them, would you still support industrial hemp? In other words, if the side-effect of allowing this "economic panacea" was that all non-industrial hemp would be destroyed by cross-polination and other factors, would you still be promoting industrial hemp? Didn't think so...