Brazil’s successful development of an ethanol-based biofuels sector since the 1980s, hardly noticed at first, has been the envy of other countries more dependent on oil imports. The government had the foresight to notice, long before the oil paradigm started to shift toward peak production, that its vast hectares of sugarcane could be put to good use as an ethanol source. Hence, it granted heavy subsidies to agricultural and related industries to alter the source of transport fuels.
Years later, many of those other countries are jumping on the biofuels bandwagon in an era where energy...
