|
 Advocates of Brazil's energy policies often cite Brazil's increased ethanol use as a reason for its recent independence from foreign energy. A brief analysis just released by the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) concludes that U.S. policy makers should make oil production a priority.
With average retail gasoline prices nearing the all-time inflation-adjusted high of US$ 3.40 per gallon, analysts have been touting Brazil as an example the United States should follow on the road to energy independence.
"The facts about Brazil's energy policy are often misrepresented," said NCPA Graduate Student Fellow D. Sean Shurtleff, the paper's author.
Although Brazil is nearing energy independence today after having imported more than 80% of its oil in the 1970s, advocates of Brazil's policies wrongly assume America's ethanol industry can displace the same percentage of oil as Brazil's.
While Brazil consumes 20 billion gallons of fuel a year (ethanol, gasoline and diesel), of which 4 billion is ethanol, the United States uses 182 billion gallons a year, more than 9 times as much.
Brazil has a major comparative advantage over the U.S. in producing ethanol from sugarcane, which produces 8 times the energy of the fossil fuel used to produce it, while America's corn-derived ethanol provides only 1.3 times as much energy.
The Brazilian-U.S. comparison also ignores the most significant reason for Brazil's energy independence: after the 1980's ethanol shortages, Brazil began to recognize that ethanol production alone would not lead to energy independence and started promoting policies to boost domestic oil production.
Increased production and new oil discoveries played the most productive role in liberating Brazil from dependence on foreign energy sources.
In 2007, Brazil announced a huge oil discovery off its coast that could increase its 14.4 billion barrels of oil reserves by 5 billion to 8 billion barrels, a production increase of nearly 40%.
"There is one lesson that U.S. policymakers should learn from Brazil's path to energy independence: make oil production a priority," Shurtleff added.
The NCPA is an internationally known nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute with offices in Dallas and Washington, D. C. that advocates private solutions to public policy problems.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Brazil received a huge boost in its international image with its selection as the host of the 2016 Olympics, but it was really just the cherry on top of the overall recognition of the country's ascension to the ranks of one of the world's most important countries. Now, as it finally takes its place on the world scene, there has been a great deal of concern about what kind of image Brazil hopes to project, now that the world is really paying attention. 
The only good thing to say about the visit to Brazil of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Monday November 23, is that it was mercifully short and lasted less than 24 hours. Ahmadinejad had his picture taken being hugged by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who gave him a warm welcome and said Iran had every right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. 
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose.