Can Brazil and other tropical countries provide biofuels for the world?
What works well for Brazil does not necessarily scale to the rest of the world. As shown in the previous section, Brazil has much lower per capita energy consumption than the U.S. (and the European Union). Scaling up to supply the world with biofuels is already having some undesirable consequences: Losing Forests to Fuel Cars The issue is not, as some have suggested, that Brazil is cutting down rain forest to make way for sugarcane plantations. It is a bit more complicated than that. In the past four decades, more than half of the Cerrado has been transformed by the encroachment of cattle ranchers and soybean farmers. And now another demand is quickly eating into the landscape: sugarcane, the raw material for Brazilian ethanol. The roots of this transformation lie in the worldwide demand for ethanol, recently boosted by a U.S. Senate bill that would mandate the use of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, more than six times the capacity of the United States’ 115 ethanol refineries. I
