Biomass Superstar Wants to Burst Confinement

The sleeper superstar of biomass and bioenergy has been kept in confinement by absurd government rules for many decades. Humans need all the clean energy tools they can get their hands on, but government continues to be the great obstruction to human needs. Government (Pelosi, Boxer, Obama, Salazar etc): GET OUT OF THE WAY!

Although researchers have been looking at corn as a possible biofuel, hemp is much more productive and cost-effective. One acre of hemp can produce ten times as much methanol as an acre of corn, with an exponentially faster rate of growth. Capable of producing ten tons of biomass per acre in less than four months, hemp would only take six percent of the American land mass to grow enough hemp to completely eliminate our need for fossil fuels. The infrastructure change would not be a problem either, as traditional farming equipment could be used to harvest hemp.

...Perhaps one of hemp's best characteristics is its environmental friendliness. It grows faster than other crops like corn or rice and it comes with the added benefit of improving soil quality where it's grown. Similarly, it does not need cleared land to grow and is naturally pest resistant, meaning that pesticides are not necessary which would help to ultimately reduce CFCs and nutrient leeching. Furthermore, hemp even kills pests in the soil, further reducing the need for pesticides. Unlike fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide and sulfur into the air, hemp actually converts carbon dioxide back into biomass at an astounding rate. The crop itself is extremely diverse and able to grow in conditions that other biofuel crops cannot. Its drought resistance makes it an ideal crop for farmers in the Midwest and other areas that are so-called "dust bowls." _Bioenergy

A wide variety of bioenergy crops are on the table--maize, wheat, rape, sorghum, miscanthus, salicornia, jatropha, rutabaga, beets, cane, poplar, pine, switchgrass, pennycress, and so on. But the superstar waiting in the wings for government to come to its senses, is hemp.