Roger Cohen on Energy Today

new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/opinion/05cohen.html

By ROGER COHEN
Published: June 5, 2008
Perhaps there’s something to treadmill wisdom. We’re all so narrow-band these days, using the vast resources of broadband to direct ourselves into a chosen news and ideological tunnel. Polarized pluralism defines us.
But the scattershot offerings of the gym’s lateral TV screens are an antidote to this tunnel vision. Seen through a film of sweat, they offer an unpredictable mix. Tailored news delivery they’re not.
Green energy is a big subject, of course, approached from all angles on countless screens. This raises the question of why nobody’s hooked up all the treadmills to the grid.
What would be more irresistible in today’s climate than losing pounds and powering the lights at once? New York City gyms alone could probably illuminate the entire eastern seaboard. We could celebrate our kilowatt footprint!
Less big than green is the offer of mortgages, which used to dominate advertising on all those screens, until the credit crunch. It’s disappeared faster than you can say “slow-motion train wreck.”
I confess I get mesmerized by all the prices on view during my workouts, not that I’d consider buying a pork-belly future or accumulating zinc. Actually, scratch that, I might. Meat and zinc are coming things.
So are the BRIC countries. The acronym was coined five years back by Goldman Sachs for the emerging behemoths: Brazil, Russia, India and China. At the time, Brazil gave the acronym brio but didn’t really belong. Its growth rates were anemic.
But Goldman Sachs didn’t get rich by getting it wrong — even on mortgages. Sure enough, Brazil’s BRIC status now looks rock-solid. Still, I got a shock when, gazing at CNBC as the incline on the treadmill’s “random” program steepened brutally, I deciphered the words “Brazil’s Investing Thrill” running across a screen.
What?
A little history is in order. I lived in Brazil in the 1980s when hyperinflation and debt defaults were the norm. People joked that the only way out was Galeão — Rio de Janeiro’s international airport.
They liked to recall that the author Stefan Zweig, arriving in Brazil from Nazi Europe, coined the phrase “País do Futuro” (“Country of the Future”) — and then killed himself. Charles de Gaulle’s Brazil verdict seemed irrefutable: not a serious country.
Now, fast-forward two decades. Foreign reserves hit $195 billion at the end of April. The real keeps rising against the dollar. Growth was 5.4 percent last year and won’t be far short of that in 2008. The main Bovespa index in São Paolo is up about 13 percent in dollar terms this year. Standard & Poor’s just boosted the country’s sovereign debt to investment grade.
Investment grade! U.S. pension funds like that. Brazil’s investing thrill!
Sorry about all the numbers. They’re not the point. The point is countries really do get re-branded.
Germany is a harmless place these days incapable of summoning a frisson. Russia has no ideology worth its name: it produces more tennis players than dialectics. As for Brazil, it’s no longer defined by Pelé, pistols and poverty, although there are still plenty of the latter two.
As it happened, when I saw CNBC’s paean to Brazil, I’d just returned from there, and it had become clear to me that oil, ethanol, land and water have produced a moment of Brazilian alchemy. Energy is the country’s new brand.
Some 35 years after the first oil shock, Brazil has moved from dependence on imports to self-sufficiency while the United States still relies on imported oil for more than half its needs. In the same period, Brazil has developed the world’s most advanced ethanol program, based on sugar cane, while the U.S. corn ethanol program is essentially a wasteful folly of dubious carbon offset merits.
You don’t have to be suffering on a treadmill to get irked about this.
Corn is food. Turning it into fuel, which is costly and energy-intensive, removes nourishment from the global food supply. Subsidizing corn-ethanol production in Iowa also diverts land from soy, another important staple.
Sugar cane is not a staple. It’s eight times more productive than corn. It grows year round. It must be processed fast, so CO2-spewing transport to distant ethanol plants is impossible (unlike for corn).
Its leftover biomass can be used to produce electricity, enough, by some estimates, to provide a third of Brazil’s power needs by 2030. Ethanol already accounts for about 50 percent of car fuel in Brazil. The vast extent of unused arable land — only 16 percent is cultivated — offers enormous scope. At $40 per barrel-of-oil-equivalent in Brazil, sugar-cane ethanol makes strategic and economic sense.
Yet, the new U.S. farm bill extends the current steep ethanol import tariff — 54 cents a gallon — until 2010, to keep what Brazil makes out. The Iowa boondoggle marches on.
This is nuts. Let the right ethanol in, think in broadband about energy — and hook up those damn exercise bikes.
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