Biofuel In Brazil
...INTRODUCTION
Energy pundit Amory Lovins (2005) notes in Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs and Security, an analysis of solutions to petroleum dependence in the United States from an independent, transdisciplinary perspective that the nation of Brazil has fostered numerous incentives and benefits to ethanol fuel initiatives, which places it in stark contrast to the petroleum dependence of automobility among most industrialized nations.
As the second largest producer of ethanol (as well as the world’s largest exporter), Brazil is considered to have the global leader in the biofuel industry, and the world’s first sustainable biofuels economy. 90% of the ethanol it produces is used for fuel. In 2006, ethanol production in Brazil amounted to 16.3 billion litres, which represents 33.3% of the world’s total ethanol production and 42% of the world’s ethanol fuel. (World Bank, 2008)
While some regard the fuel scenario of Brazil as some kind of anomaly, a queer paradigm of automobility that “could only happen in Brazil,” such a supposition overlooks the large amount of reforms that Brazil undertook in order to get to its current state. Brazil is not just the fifth largest country in the world in both geography and population, but it is also one of the ten largest economies in the world, a far cry from the ‘mere’ Portuguese colony it once was. As such, it is a technologically sophisticated and industrialized nation, whose current prosperity is a direct result of privatization and free trade reforms in the late 20th century. (CIA, 2008; Virtual Brazil, 2007)
In this light, the adoption of ethanol as a primary fuel source within the nation has come to attain special significance to other industrialized nations such as the United States. This is the result of a consequent realization that petroleum dependence is not mutually inclusive of...
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