RED FLAGS ON THE GREEN LAWN

In yesterday's New York Post there is an article about a green jobs training programme to be run by hucksters. Not so much new news any of this, take a look at all the 'greenie meanies' out there and you will find a bunch of people talking lots of idealism and doing lots of nothing. Cross a hippy with a democracy and you get a hypocrisy. It's why so few of them are using hemp paper or wearing hemp clothes or even eating hemp. They just want to make some money and look good, it's a tool for politicians and con artists; like Jason Safford, who is holding out his greedy hand for $1million from the taxpayer. An insider at his company, Safflyn, said he shouldn't be entrusted with taxpayers dollars: "I see too many red flags, too many things they've mismanaged...'Integrity' is one of the words they like to throw around - but they don't have integrity."

Few of these eco warriors do. They like to run non-profit orgs so they can then make their money writing stupid books and giving talks, often flying around in a jet using lots of fuel and polluting everywhere they go like Al Gore - who, like so many of these pseudo environmentalists, does not wear hemp.

SIGN OF THE TIMES

The image above was taken by the undercover reporter at schmoo the run at the Climate Change Rally on 8 December. A lot of people there were smiling at the sign, as they were wearing hemp, but a lot of people were also turning away sheepishly. Al Gore did not bother to attend, he was somewhere else making lots of money and annoying the press with his attitude. As he, and other climate change salespeople are unable to answer questions about Piers Corbyn, sunspots, the earth being closer to the sun, previous warm periods, and other issues that poke holes in their agenda, they often try to minimise questions. Hit and run is the technique, but not before taking a good deal of money - $50,000,000 in Gore's case. Monbiot does not live cheap either. And both do a good deal of travelling to preach to others that they ought no to travel.

Whilst assembling this sign, which was held up by hemp stalks, and bordered by the same, I could not help noticing that they were still green, after having been harvested in August 2006. Perhaps they were the stems of the Chameleon variety, but I cannot be completely sure.

For those wishing to join the ranks of real environmentalists and wear hemp, here is a list of some suppliers:

http://www.minawear.com/

http://www.geomio.com/

http://www.thtc.co.uk/

http://www.thehempshop.co.uk/

http://www.braintreehemp.co.uk/

http://www.puresativa.com/

HOW GREEN IS THE TIMES?

This Saturday an article in the Times by Anna Shepard starts off with a very good question - How Green is my bag? It then fails completely to give an answer. It talks about cottton bags made by rich people like a certain member of the Bush family, on sale for £35 at Harrods, and the Anya Hindmarch bag - which Anna might know, if she read her own paper, was a disaster made in Chinese sweatshops. Click here for a link.

If she read up on her subject she just might have mentioned hemp - or even jute and ramie, but the world is full of these journalists and only an idiot believes that they know about everything they sound off about in the papers. Especially if that paper is the Times, and happens to be printed on wood pulp paper. It is not that hard to produce hemp paper, individuals do it all the time and the Ecologist used such paper in one of their issues.

Slowly, people are waking up to the fact that cotton is an environmentally destructive plant and that the press, including some of the 'eco-mags' are not telling us the truth. Many in the 'green' circles are just not aware of this at all - including Al Gore and George Monbiot. The former made a fool of himself in London as he barged in and kicked invited guests off the guests list and barred the press from asking questions - especially inconvenient ones; he got paid $100,000 for this charade, and anyone stupid enough to hire him deserves to lose a little money. For one thing, the sight of another green hypocrite dressed up in cotton, after having flown thousands of miles to get his cheque, is enough to start a riot; which almost occured after Monbiot's speech at the US Embassy on 8 December, as a group called We Are Change tried to get him to talk facts about things. I left before they started on him, but not without waving a sign about hemp and showing my hemp bag, the one that says: "Real Eco Bags are made from Hemp". It got knowing looks from a lot of people. Much as I wanted to wear it to the Gore event, they were not letting many people in and probably would have had me tasered, just like the student in Florida who asked an inconvenient question of John Kerry. Brave New World indeed. More like 1984.

INCONVENIENT FACTS

It has been windy wet and cold here in London these last few days, but no surprise to those of you who took on board the predictions of Piers Corbyn (posted on this site earlier this summer).

The Global Warming people have had to change their tune and are now yelling climate change, much to the delight of anarchists and the nuclear power industry, which is selling itself through the likes of George Monbiot. Al Gore is also into the nuke thing, his mouth is where his money is, as his family has a stake in that business. The Sunday Telegraph published some very inconvenient facts (19/8/07, Christopher Booker) for Mr. Gore. One was about the false date published by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). Booker writes: "The error was so glaring that, on August 7, GISS had to post revised figures which show, instead of temperatures reaching their highest level in the past decade, that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934. Of the 10 warmest years since 1880, it turns out that four were in the 1930s and only three in the past decade."

Which means that James Hansen, head of GISS and Gore's closest scientific ally, has been promoting rubbish.

ETHANOL, HEMP & THE PRICE OF CORN

As the price of a barrel rises these days, and let's review, it has risen sharply since September, 2001, other commodities rise as well; how I wish I had bought gold when it was cheap, at a mere $350 an ounce! Having missed such a golden opportunity, there is comfort in knowing there are other markets. In Iowa this month, the price of a more mundane item, corn, was up for discussion. While it had no such stellar rise as petrol and precious metals , it is nonetheless going up a notch, from $2.00 a bushel to $2.10 a bushel. OK, that's only 5%, but enough to encourage farmers to pick corn this year rather than soy, wheat or cotton.

Part of the rise in the price of corn is due to its cellulose content; cellulose is a carbohydrate which converts easily to ethanol, and for many people tired of paying lots of money for petrol, this is an important bit of information. Truckers have been demanding biofuel for years now in the US, as their incomes are shrinking as inflation rises. So the corn farmers are now able to sell what was once farm waste, the inedible parts of the corn plant, and do the country a service as well. Patriotism, without shedding blood.

However simple some things may be in life, there are always those who can get things wrong, and in the reporting of this in no less a paper than the New York Times, there were worried voices expressing concern about using a food plant to supply energy. Do these people really imagine that they are going to use all the kernels to make fuel? Do they not realise that the kernels are a fraction of the plant's weight, they are the seeds, thus they contain the proteins that make them valuable as a food; the rest of the plant can be dehydrated and fermented for biofuel. We kill two birds here for the price of one.

Sloppy reporting over the years about energy plants is not limited to the Grey Lady in the Big Apple; no less a rag than the UK's Independent will write articles about biofuel without an understanding of the whole picture. Recently, they wrote that it was unfeasible for the UK to farm energy as the rape crop would not produce enough ethanol from its stems. Right they are, but why are they talking about rape when Henry Ford, who certainly did know a thing or two about cars and energy, talked about hemp and farm wastes?

At least the NYT article (Matthew Wald, 16 January, 2006) took notes from those in the business, such as Robert C. Brown, a professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State, who noted that the idea that using corn for energy was taking food from our mouths was incorrect. Benie Punt, also quoted in the NYT, is a manager of a plant in Siouxland, and he was also able to point out that the leftovers from the ethanol conversion are even used as animal feed.

The scare tactics, interestingly enough, come from the Washington based International Food Policy Research Institute, whose director, Joachim von Braun, warns that: "even a small shift could have big effects...the mouth of your car is a monster compared to your family's stomach needs." OK, one does not need to be a rocket scientist, or related to a former Nazi rocket scientist, to see that this argument is actually better suited towards two other goals - reducing driving and reducing dependence on foreign energy. For an idiot, it stands to reason that we better not use farm wastes to produce ethanol, unless we want a big raise in the price of food.

Actually, by harnessing the energy in farm wastes, the US would quite likely get back on its feet finacially, while providing jobs in the energy and agricultural sectors to its own citizens. If farm wastes were not enought to provide the country with its energy supplies, then certain crops could be grown to provide more, such as hemp, which is one of the fastest biomass producing plants in the world, ready to harvest in a season with little effort. Its stems are high in cellulose, and the seeds can be harvested for oil and cattle feed among other products.

The Founding Fathers grew hemp, so there ought to be little objection to growing this in the US, it can, by the way, be grown in all 50 states. With a little more education and the will to succeed we can. Recently, Sir Richard Branson put his money into ethanol production after listening to Al Gore hold forth on the subject in London. Sir Richard is using farm wastes, thus utilising what is already cheap and available. Little wonder that he became the billionaire that he did.