As profound as Jack Herer’s above statement seems, there is a $100 000 reward for anyone who can disprove this claim.

I recently came across this challenge in his book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, when researching how to address a problem with which the government was posed, relating to the transport fuels and transport energy section of the Provincial Land Transport Framework for the Western Cape.

We face a compound problem in the current transport fuel sources made from oil and the derivatives thereof. These different problems with energy are broadly related but distinct. They range from national security, such as knowing whether South Africa is secure in its oil supplies; micro-economic, such as rising petrol pump prices; macro-economic problems, such as billions of rands taken out of our economy for purchasing foreign oil; and environmental problems, such as pollution of both soil and water.

Even within those, the problems can break down even further. We could, for example, break down the national security problem further and ask: Are we funding a Jihad? What happens when the oil runs out, if ever?

With this multitude of problems, you would do well to address the problem at hand. This can be likened to how we solve problems we face in our daily lives: we have to breathe every few seconds, drink water daily, eat at least weekly, pay our bills monthly, etc.

If you are faced with the possibility of drowning in a river, you would be best placed to ensure you continue breathing, not thinking about how you will be paying your monthly bills. This addresses the problem at hand.

It is an added benefit if the solution solves not only the pressing problem, but another related problem as well.

When facing the transport energy problems, strong evidence suggests that the problem at hand relates to money; and to address the problem, we need to move to an open fuel standard immediately in this country and show our neighbouring countries how to do the same.

Car saving programmes have been proven in the United States to be ineffective because of the increase in the price of oil.

Oil imports mean that billions of rands leave our shores en route to foreign oil companies. This poses a major threat to the cost of the transport system and the cost of everything that relies on transport, including food prices.

We are price-takers to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the foreign governments it supports.

In a nation such as ours, where we have the greatest economic inequality among our people, oil price fluctuations are devastating. For a developing nation such as South Africa, this is not where we want to be. South Africa needs its energy independence, meaning we have to wean ourselves off oil.

What this means is that the government should ensure it becomes mandatory for every vehicle sold – not made – in South Africa to be flex-fuel compatible. Brazil has had much success in this arena, with at least six million flex-fuel vehicles already on the streets, with significantly cleaner air to boot and a net exporter of ethanol.

Unless the government makes this call, we can never truly reduce the dependency on foreign oil. What this means is that regardless of which fuels are proposed by energy companies as the alternative to fossil fuels, the consumer is now empowered to make his/her choice at the petrol pump for whichever fuel he/she wants – whether it be petroleum, ethanol, methanol, diesel or biodiesel.

Naturally, of course, consumers will choose the most affordable fuel, thereby preventing oil companies to push up petrol prices whenever it suits them.

This open fuel standard should apply only to combustion engines, so as not to impede the development of hybrid and electric vehicles, which could provide a future solution.

Let us say we have now established an open fuel standard: which fuel is likely to be the star performer at the pumps?

Without too much speculation, the astronautical engineers working on the NASA human space programme have already provided us with the answer: methanol. It is the fuel being proposed by Dr Robert Zubrin’s Mars Direct plan as the most economical rocket fuel for human space exploration to Mars.

In a revolutionary redesign of the $400-billion NASA 30-day Report on a mission to Mars, Dr Zubrin’s Mars Direct plan proposes a mission that can get humans to that planet for only $45bn. The plan uses methanol, which can be produced with little difficulty from the Martian atmosphere, a live-off-the-land approach that eliminates the need to carry large amounts of fuel from earth for the return mission to earth from Mars.

This fact makes methanol an attractive propulsion fuel option for Mars exploration missions, using the test and operational infrastructure that is currently in place to support current hydrocarbon-fuelled engine systems.

Additionally, it is likely that no exotic, advanced technologies will be required to develop low-cost, modest performance methanol fuel rocket engine systems.

Dr Zubrin claims that the use of this low-cost propulsion system technology should provide significant improvement in life cycle cost, reliability and safety of future space systems, as well as make both manned and unmanned Mars exploration missions attractive, realistic cost options.

The reason this is relative to our problem is that it proves a basic fact, in that methane gas is one of the most abundant substances in the universe and also on earth. It is said you could make methanol alcohol from just about anything, and producing it would be extremely cost-competitive.

Yet another fascinating part of the Mars programme is that future generations of humans would most likely terra-form Mars to make it earth-like and, therefore, more habitable. For this, greenhouse gas machines will be generating emissions in the atmosphere, heating up the cold Martian landscape. This illustrates the undesirable quality in the high toxicity levels of alcohol-based methanol fuel.

The result of its toxicity is that it is not the most attractive, when one accounts for the environmental costs of using it. It solves the problem we face in as far as it is a cheaper fuel, but does very little to address the environmental problems we face.

Although, due to its cost efficiency, methanol will play a part in providing a solution for renewable fuels sources, another alcohol fuel type, ethanol, would likely play a much bigger part in the solution.

Ethanol fuels have been proven in Brazil and Sweden and are making a comeback in the US. It is not only the cleanest fuel we know of, but also the only choice for the Indianapolis 500 because of its high performance. Why?

Although it is true that ethanol has a lower British thermal unit than petroleum, that is not the whole story, as 80% of petroleum is wasted as heat. If you raise the compression of the engine, you can extract more energy.

Ethanol has higher octane, about 129, which is required for high-compression engines, so it can be much more efficient in the right engine.

E-Flex fuel, an ethanol-petroleum mix, is a compromise, since petrol would pre-detonate under high compassion.

Not all bio-ethanol fuels are created equal, and if I were to choose the pound-for-pound greatest-of-all-time champion fuel, then the most spectacular and promising of all is hemp ethanol.

Also known as cannabis sativa, or industrial hemp, you cannot get high from smoking hemp. The psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, THC, is less than 1% in hemp – making it useless as a drug.

Biofuels are fuels made from recently living organisms. They can be divided into three categories: First-generation biofuels are made largely from edible sugars and starches; second-generation biofuels are made from non-edible plant materials; and third-generation biofuels are made from algae and microbes.

Hemp falls in the second generation of biofuels, as a source of fuel from high-cellulosic plants. And as far as cellulose content goes, hemp has no equal.

The case for hemp ethanol can be traced back to the days of Henry Ford. Hemp’s history is big, complicated and I am only going to scratch the surface.

The first thing we have to understand about hemp and its cousin marijuana is that they were very much legal.

In the 1920s, the early oil barons such as John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, the Rothschilds of Shell, among others, became aware of the possibilities of Ford’s vision of cheap hemp methanol fuel, and they kept oil prices incredibly low, between $1 and $4 per barrel until 1970 – almost 50 years!

Then, once they were finally sure of the lack of competition, the price of oil jumped to almost $60+ per barrel over the next 30 years.

When Ford invented the car for the masses in the Ford Model T, there was no petroleum infrastructure, only a large amount of ethanol around.

He grew cannabis/hemp/marijuana on his estate at Iron Mountain after 1937, possibly to prove the cheapness of hemp methanol production.

Ford made plastic cars with wheat straw, hemp and sisal (Popular Mechanics, December 1941, “Pinch Hitters for Defense”), biodegradable products that proved to be superior to the metals we use today.

He once famously predicted that the ethanol fuels are the fuels of the future.

Every farmer made ethanol in those days, so to accommodate both the interests of the oil barons and the general public, the Model T was made as a flex-fuel car. This meant that you could fill up with petroleum in the big cities and with ethanol in the rural areas, where it was abundant.

The ethanol fuel-making practices, however, came to an end with alcohol prohibition in the US, outlawing alcohol manufacture by the public. Those who dared to continue would have to conduct their practices at night, by the light of the moon and out of the sight of the law enforcers. This gave rise to what became known as “moonshine”, or bootleg alcohol.

So where do we go from here? Well, forget about global warming or trying to reduce it.

While the world is slowly waking up to the gross misrepresentations made about anthropogenic global warming – or man-made global warming – and its non-existence, through the claims of what is now called “Climategate”, a few brave but ordinary men must take the initiative rather to support the decision to move toward an open fuel standard. This is to give you and me and all other consumers a choice at the petrol pump between the cheapest fuels and save the economy billions in the process.

In the meantime, South Africa should move to an E30 fuel standard, where a 30% ethanol fuel mixture is allowed at the pumps, as our cars should be able to accommodate this E-flex mixture with no modifications. This would, of course, have the effect of reducing our pollution by 30%.

As for the cultivation of the most useful plant known to man, hemp, South Africans must begin to make the proper distinction between hemp and medical marijuana – a distinction any child can make.

Since it is currently legal to cultivate hemp in South Africa, we need to encourage our government to begin issuing commercial permits to grow hemp.

We need to encourage further research into this plant, to establish the technologies required to benefit economically from the hemp processing.

Furthermore, it would only be the humane thing to do to campaign for the right to prescribe medical marijuana to cancer and HIV/Aids sufferers as well as to patients with the countless other serious diseases for which it would provide relief.

While hemp oil has been proven by Rick Simpson in Canada to cure cancer, HIV/Aids sufferers around the world have stated that treatment with marijuana was the difference between the feeling of dying from the disease and living with it.

In a country with an HIV/Aids crisis, South Africa can ill-afford to fall further behind the rest of the world in realising the benefits of this plant.

We should be doing more than simply legalising marijuana, by ensuring we regulate and tax it – which will take this valuable resource away from organised crime.

It would prove to be a valuable economic resource, as the proceeds could be ploughed back into our healthcare industry.

The hemp revolution has begun, whether you are ready for it or not.

Brendon Cloete

Transport economist