Ethanol is not the answer
Two years ago, Brazil garnered kudos from policy analysts when the country announced that it was officially energy independent. It took a single scare to motivate the Brazilians to get off of foreign oil – the 1973 oil crisis. Over the past three decades, Brazilians have exhausted themselves in developing an alternative to gasoline through ethanol derived from sugarcane. Unfortunately for us, the United States has been slow to learn the importance of energy independence. We often ignore looking outside our borders to see if someone else is doing something better. Now, with ethanol, we’re facing the opposite problem – we’re looking at other countries to see what they’re doing right, but failing to distinguish differences in political economies that permit or inhibit success. For Brazil, sugar-based ethanol solves both problems with oil that Americans are trying to address – the ethanol is green and homegrown. But Brazil got lucky. They did not set out in ’73 to create greener fuels, only to become energy independent. It just so happened that the most viable domestic resource that could be produced to supplement their domestic oil production was the “green” sugarcane. So after finally concluding that we want to become energy independent and studying the nation that did it the best, the United States has decided to take a page from the Brazilian playbook and go after ethanol, only we don’t have sugarcane to make it. So what do we do? Well, we can’t import it (that kind of defeats the whole idea of energy independence). So ... is there something we can use to make domestic ethanol, something that would be plentiful in the United States?
