"Brazil may soon become the world's first biofuels economy. Indeed, Brazil has made kicking the oil habit a national priority, on par with redistributing digital technologies to its people. Brazil has been manufacturing biodiesel and ethanol fuels for decades, a strategy spurred in part by national security concerns on the part of the former military dictatorship. But the degree to which Brazilians have embraced biofuels today is truly staggering.

Brazil is a world leader in biofuel technologies. More than 40% of Brazil's energy comes from biofuels and renewables. This year, over 90% of all new cars sold in Brazil will be flex-fuel vehicles, which can run on either gasoline or biofuels. Those cars can fill up at over 30,000 biofuel filling stations across the country.  It's all part of Brazil's "revolucao energetica" (energy revolution). As Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (or "Lula") pointed out in a recent opinion piece.  Indeed, in speeches now, Lula supposedly routinely calls on the rest of the world to join Brazil in "planting oil." On the face of it, this is a bright green energy miracle, but things are not always what they seem. There is, of course, first of all, the biofuel dilemma to be dealt with: that much energy is consumed growing the crops from which biofuels are made, and their production can cut into needed food production and carry other environmental costs.

One of the largest costs, in Brazil, is the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Much of Brazil's biofuel production comes from soy beans, and soya production is one of the key drivers of rainforest destruction. The cutting of the Amazon is obviously a huge problem in terms of protecting biodiversity. But it also undermines the very goal of building a climate-friendly economy Brazilians seem to genuinely cherish: as one recent report puts it "Deforestation is responsible for 80 per cent of Brazil's carbon dioxide emissions."

One of the answers is to make better use of the farmland already available and of the biomass already being produced. Another is to use smart breeding techniques to improve the suitability of crops for producing biofuels. Still another is to focus on energy efficiency at least as much as energy source."